ProjectVRM – joeandrieu.com
type: channel
description: My personal space
date: 2017-06-14T22:38:45Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: Ten Years Later
items: Fourth Parties are agents. Third Parties aren’t necessarily.
items: Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing
items: Introducing User Driven Services
items: The Great Reconfiguration
items: Paper Prototype Rocks
items: VRM: The user as point of integration

Ten Years Later
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2017-06-14T22:38:45Z
subject: Identity
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: GDPR
subject: IIW
subject: Personal Data Store
subject: User Driven
subject: User Driven Services
subject: VRM
description: Ten years ago I wrote a blog post that captured a key architectural insight at the core of VRM: putting the user at the center of integration not only improves the quality of services, it simplifies our systems. The article captured the gestalt of VRM and helped catalyze a range of conversations that still shape the VRM approach. Since then, we have seen a lot of progress. Here are a few standout examples. Continue reading →
encoded: Ten years ago I wrote a blog post that captured a key architectural insight at the core of VRM: putting the user at the center of integration not only improves the quality of services, it simplifies our systems. When we put the user at the center, and make them the point of integration, the entire system becomes simpler, more robust, more scalable, and more useful. The article captured the gestalt of VRM and helped catalyze a range of conversations that still shape the VRM approach. Since then, we have seen a lot of progress. Sometimes we proceeded in fits and starts and there were certainly failures along the way, including my own venture, SwitchBook. When I started pulling together my notes for this anniversary post, I was mildly surprised and delighted at how much real work got done and the real-world impact we’ve had. Here are a few VRMy developments in the last decade worth noting. Please chime in with a comment if you know of a good one to add to the list. Coming in December of that same year, OAuth kicked off a series of standard protocols for identity, attribute sharing, and permissions, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and User Managed Access (now at 2.0). These efforts brought together the leading technology companies to collaboratively develop new standards that give individuals greater flexibility and control over data exchange between online services. Companies like Personal.com. (now TeamData), Digi.me, and Cozy Cloud shipped user-driven personal data stores. Software project HIE of One offers a personal data store that lets individuals manage our own healthcare data. In Europe, GDPR has ushered in a new wave of regulatory requirements and penalties driving companies and organizations to give individuals easier access to, greater control of, and more security in our personal data. JLINC Labs offers a provenance service layer that allows companies to quickly attain GDPR compliance for the right to erasure and data provenance by giving individuals di…

Fourth Parties are agents. Third Parties aren’t necessarily.
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2011-04-13T19:16:43Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: Doc Searls
subject: fourth parties
subject: Platform
subject: VRM
description: Fourth Parties is a powerful, but sometimes confusing term. In fact, I think Doc recently mischaracterized it in a recent post to the ProjectVRM mailing list. Normally, I wouldn’t nitpick about this, but there are two key domains where this … Continue reading →
encoded: Fourth Parties is a powerful, but sometimes confusing term. In fact, I think Doc recently mischaracterized it in a recent post to the ProjectVRM mailing list. Normally, I wouldn’t nitpick about this, but there are two key domains where this is vital and I’m knee deep in both: contracts and platforms. Doc said: Like, is the customer always the first party and the vendor the second party? Well, no. So, some clarification. First and second parties are like the first and second person voices in speech. The person speaking is the first person, and uses the first person voice (I, me, mine, myself). The person being addressed is the second person, and is addressed in the second person voice (you, your, yourself). And To sum it up, third parties mostly assist vendors. That is, they show up as helpers to vendors. The first point is great, and if you continue this further (and make the leap from parties to data providers), you get something like this: The ownership of “your” and “my” data is usually clear. However, ownership of the different types of “our” data is a challenge at best. To complicate matters further, every instance of “my data” is somebody else’s “your data”. In every case, there is this mutually reciprocal relationship between us and them. In the VRM case, we usually think of the individual as owning “my data” and the vendor as owning “your data”, but for the vendor, the reverse is true: to them their data is “my data” and the individual’s data is “your data”. Similar dynamics occur when the other party is an individual. I bring my data, you bring your data, and together we’ll engage with “our” data. We need an approach that respects and applies to everyone’s data, you, me, them, everybody.. Which is from my post on data ownership. The trick is that 1st party and 2nd party perspectives are symmetrical. We are their 2nd party and they are their 1st party. Whatever solution we come up with in the VRM world needs to work for everyone as their own 1st party. Every…

Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2010-01-21T22:32:19Z
subject: Information Sharing
subject: Intention Economy
subject: Personal Data Store
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Shared Information
subject: User Driven Services
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: CRM
subject: data ownership
subject: Doc Searls
subject: privacy
subject: project VRM
subject: User Driven
subject: VRM
description: The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services. The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from … Continue reading →
encoded: The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services. The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from the physical world, suggesting a win-lose, us-verses-them mentality that retards the development of rich, powerful services based on shared information. Anyone up for sacred cow cheeseburgers? I’m a member–and a big fan–of Steve Holcombe‘s “Data Ownership in the Cloud” LinkedIn group and I love the efforts of the Dataportability guys and am a big supporter of the Privacy and Public Policy work group at Kantara. There is a lot of good work being done by folks trying to figure out how to give people greater control over the use of data about them (privacy) and gain access to data they use or created (dataportability). Unfortunately, sometimes the arguments behind these efforts are based on who owns–or who should own–the data. This is not just an intellectual debate or political rallying call, it often undermines our common efforts to build a better system. Consider this: Privacy as secrecy is dead Data sharing is data copying Transaction data has dual ownership Yours, mine, & ours: Reality is complicated Taking back ownership is confrontational Privacy as secrecy is dead First, the data is pretty much already out there. The issue isn’t “How do we keep data from bad people,” it’s “How do we keep people from doing bad things with data?” DRM and crypto and related technology as the sole means to prevent data leakage and data abuse are failures. Sooner or later, the bad guys break the system and get the data. Sure, there are smart things we can do to protect ourselves. Just like we wear seatbelts and lock our front doors, we should also use SSL and multi-factor authentication, but we can’t count on technology to keep our secrets. We need solutions that work even when the secret is out. In fact, privacy isn’t about information we keep secret. It…

Introducing User Driven Services
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2009-04-26T00:24:45Z
subject: Intention Economy
subject: User Driven Services
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: Internet
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: VRM
subject: World Wide Web
description: Our world is continually becoming more and more user driven. From cable TV to YouTube, from newspapers to blogs, from Wal-Mart to eBay, from Ma Bell to the Internet, the shift from centralized, structured systems of authority to emergent, collaborations … Continue reading →
encoded: Our world is continually becoming more and more user driven. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-357" title="world UI" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dreamstime_8489486world-uismall.jpg" alt="world UI" width="180" height="180" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dreamstime_8489486world-uismall.jpg 180w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dreamstime_8489486world-uismall-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px" />From cable TV to YouTube, from newspapers to blogs, from Wal-Mart to eBay, from Ma Bell to the Internet, the shift from centralized, structured systems of authority to emergent, collaborations between individuals has been reshaping our political, social, and economic world for generations. This is a trend that has driven—and been driven by—the massive success of the Internet, email, the World Wide Web, eBay, Google, RSS, FaceBook, YouTube, and Twitter. Each of these examples took an existing model and made it more user driven: networking, messaging, electronic publishing, buying & selling, content discovery & advertising, news aggregation/syndication, online video, status updates. The conclusion: companies which find ways to be more user driven are more valuable, more profitable, and more successful. What does it mean to be “user driven”? At its most basic, it means putting the user in charge, in some way. Fully realized, it means putting the user at the center of the system, as a point of integration, origination, and control. We call these fully realized systems “User Driven Services”. User Driven Services put users in charge. Users start each interaction, manage the flow of the experience, and control what and how data is captured, used and propagated. Users are the cause and the controller, working with service providers to co-create collaborations that create value for all parties. From self-serve gas stations and soda …

The Great Reconfiguration
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2009-04-24T09:46:48Z
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Search
subject: User Driven Search
subject: User Driven Services
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: IIW
subject: IIW2009a
subject: User Driven
subject: VRM
subject: VRM Workshop 2009
subject: VRM2009
subject: VRM2009a
description: The Internet is undergoing a major reconfiguration. No longer is it sufficient for companies to package a value proposition on their website and then drive traffic to it through ads, search engine optimization, and reciprocal links. Today companies must find … Continue reading →
encoded: The Internet is undergoing a major reconfiguration. No longer is it sufficient for companies to package a value proposition on their website and then drive traffic to it through ads, search engine optimization, and reciprocal links. Today companies must find ways to provide a value proposition wherever the user might be: on Facebook and Twitter, on their iPhones, and even through 3rd party applications accessing deep into the company’s datasphere through APIs and webhooks. The Internet is reconfiguring around the user, wherever people happen to be. I’ve been talking with folks in the VRM community about this topic over the last few years. VRM is, at its core, about starting with the user, re-engineering systems to maximize user freedom and control, and placing the user at the point of integration. Or, as Doc Searls puts it, creating tools for “both independence and engagement”. For example, I’ve led several discussions at various VRM workshops on what I call “user driven search“: what would happen if the user were truly in control of all the data related to their search and could engage any Search provider they like with the full scope of that information and under the user’s terms? In the last several months, I have been advocating a new term has that captures the core direction of both VRM and User Driven Search: “User Driven Services”. When you configure your services around the user as the primary point of origination, integration, and control, you are building User Driven Services. Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive into what we mean by User Driven Services; consider it a warm up for both the VRM West Coast Workshop 2009 and the Internet Identity Workshop. More …

Paper Prototype Rocks
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2009-02-12T00:31:28Z
subject: Search
subject: User Driven Search
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: carolyn snyder
subject: development
subject: paper prototyping
subject: programming
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: search map
subject: SwitchBook
subject: VRM
description: Last week we used a prototyping technique that has changed the way I look at development: paper prototyping. I had heard a bit about this before and it sounded great… but there’s always such a drive to just start coding! … Continue reading →
encoded: Last week we used a prototyping technique that has changed the way I look at development: paper prototyping. I had heard a bit about this before and it sounded great… but there’s always such a drive to just start coding! Before I reach Carolyn Snyder’s excellent Paper Prototyping, I hadn’t realized what I was missing. The key difference from what you might be thinking–and definitely what I was thinking–is that paper prototyping isn’t just about doing mockups of the UI and asking users for feedback. It means recreating the a subset of the core user experience using a paper-based model, with a human “computer” and the user interacting not with the facilitators or testers, but directly with the pieces of paper, by pointing for hovering, touching for clicking and writing for typing. The results were amazing. We took two weeks to develop & construct a paper prototype for our upcoming Search Map software, which is the first implementation of the SwitchBook approach to User-driven Search (which is the focus of our work with the VRM community). That was followed by one week doing the actual testing. To build out a paper prototype like this you have to have a critically specific definition of what it is you are building. Depending on how early you are in the gestation of your software idea, this might be impossible. But if you have a pretty good idea of the basics, the paper prototype will force you to actually write down both a subset of tasks in sufficient detail for the user and the prototype to do with paper assets, and create the pieces of paper that represent every window, every menu, every dialog box, every state in the interface. It felt like we went through three revisions of our core UI before we actually had any users. We found there were so many assumptions hidden in our initial requirements documentation that we were missing key parts of the user experience. And then, by mapping out those parts of the experience, we made significant leaps in simplifying and unif…

VRM: The user as point of integration
type: item
creator: Joe Andrieu
date: 2007-06-14T10:13:55Z
subject: Personal Data Store
subject: ProjectVRM
subject: Vendor Relationship Management
subject: point of integration
subject: User Driven
subject: User Driven Services
subject: Vendor Relationship Managment
subject: VRM
description: On yesterday’s Project VRM conference call, a piece of the Vendor Relationship Management puzzle snapped into alignment in a flash of insight. It wasn’t something new to the movement, rather it was a realization about the primacy and criticality of … Continue reading →
encoded: On yesterday’s Project VRM conference call, a piece of the Vendor Relationship Management puzzle snapped into alignment in a flash of insight. It wasn’t something new to the movement, rather it was a realization about the primacy and criticality of what we are doing and how to communicate it. It has always been a part of the conversation, just one that we often took a bit of time to get around to. And yet, it is perhaps the most important piece of all: When we put the user at the center, and make them the point of integration, the entire system becomes simpler, more robust, more scalable, and more useful. This is a profound shift that has some interesting parallels with a concept in AI called “stigmergy” and with a bit of classic Einstein becomes a totally new way to think about next generation systems design. In other words VRM changes the landscape in a way that not only makes life better for individuals, it profoundly improves the information architecture that modern society depends on. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll try to explain. User Centrism VRM has its roots in the user-centric Identity movement and has user-centrism at the core of its DNA. The first, and perhaps most obvious, interpretation of user-centrism is user control. That, unfortunately, is part of the problem. User Control User control is critically important. It resonates with the core of the modern social contract. Freedom. Liberty. Capitalism. The Age of Reason. Liberalism. These systems and ideologies all assume that the individual, and only the individual, has legitimate moral authority over his or her life, assets and the disposition of both. These are powerful concepts. So powerful, that when you build systems that provide individual control, you energize vast personal resources that in turn become real economic power, measured in trillions of dollars, just to consider US GDP. Contrast this with fascism, communism, and socialism, which place the state above the individual and in varying forms ta…