My Community

My community – physical or digital – consists of people close to me in many different ways.

Family

Family members in my community may hold special rights, even legal rights like spouses, parents or guardians.

I may not want my children to have access to the "NextGreatAppTM", and I may want to monitor posts they are viewing. Or, in the worst case when I die, my spouse should not have to fret about getting access to resources I have online in social media (e.g. pictures), etc.

Friends

Friends in my community are pretty similar to the physical and digital social media 'friends' we are familiar with, having rights but not quite that of family.

Friends have access to my posts and stories, and represent the major use case in the Digital Home Initiative. "I've already granted access to Jimmy as a friend on platform A, I shouldn't need to do it on platforms B, C, D, etc.

Colleagues

Colleagues in my community have passed basic "I know who you are" authentication, but have least rights among people in my community. This may include people I work with, people I do business with (e.g. mechanic), etc.

I may choose a service that allows me to stratify my posts for friends (think FB) and for Colleagues (think LinkedIn)

Friends, family and colleagues can also be grouped to give ‘birds-of-a-feather’ access to important information and postings.

Physical Community Standards

My physical community of family and friends is supported by a vast amount of non-digital government regulations and standards used regularly even by commercial communities, including:

USPS, Snail Mail

Seamless, secure communications

POTS
Plain-Old
Telephone System

Seamless, secure voice communications

DOT, Local and Interstate road systems

Seamless inter-modal (car, truck, bus, bike, train) travel

NHTSA, EPA, etc.

Vehicle, transportation and safety standards

Digital Community Standards

The lack of digital ‘car’, ‘interstate’, ‘telephone’ and ‘letter’ standards force digital communities to signup for multiple private services, most financed by surveillance/ad incentives. Portability across these multiple services does not exist: you cannot ‘move’ or vote with your feet, and changes made on one Social Network SN (e.g. add friend, unfriend, add to group) are not visible on other SNs.

Email, Messages

DHI proposes standards to enable seamless, secure digital communications

VoIP

DHI proposes standards that would connect digital voice calls originating in SNs in a seamless, secure manner

Directories;
Post & Message Abstracts; etc.

My digital community can inter-operate across multiple SNs

FCC

Digital Home standards and regulations assure privacy in digital domains

DHI enables digital social network standards to create seamless digital communities

Standardization – like that in the physical domain – is required to assure social communities have similar abilities and rights in the digital domain as enjoyed in the physical domain.