Portfolio

Digital Home Initiative

Privacy for digital homes & communities... Portability enabling social media competition

A Day in a Digital Home

The Digital Home

Land and home ownership is a hallmark of any advanced civilization. The Digital Home Initiative establishes 'digital home ownership' by creating control, privacy and security conventions needed by individuals, families & communities to thrive in cyberspace, where they can gather freely without unwanted surveillance.

Like the US Bill of Rights, rights of people in their digital homes must be protected. Occupation and surveillance by unwanted parties - ad bots, IoT, smart speakers, etc. - should be known, and expelled if desired.

While not directly related to IoT, smart homes, smart speakers, etc, these devices contribute to the challenge by opening digital back doors into our lives.

Roads & Services for
Digital Communities

In physical communities, we take for granted the roads and services that connect us: road and car standards e.g. the stop sign; the USPS for seamless communication; POTS telephone service to talk to anybody, anywhere, anytime.

Digital civilization needs to catch up. If I choose to leave FB or LinkedIn, I shouldn't have to sacrifice the digital communities I've established there. I also may choose to live in a digital place with less or no billboards, or billboard diversity.

We need our digital roads paved and connected, our digital communications secured, global, reliable.

Architecture Changing the Digital Social Landscape

Romans used architecture to change their empire.

Where most other industries are using digitization techniques to break up fiefdoms and silos, current social networks use their fiefdoms to control their people.

DHI proposes modern digital architectures to break up the digital fiefdoms created by 1st-gen social media, and replace them with communities that value security, privacy, and portability.

Short Digital Tech Stack

A tech stack everyone can dig into.

Today's tech standards like REST, JSON and others make it easy for social networks to connect, while maintaining their proprietary innovation that separates them from others.

"Digital Home sweet digital home"

Characteristics of a Safe Digital Home

security and privacy

Carve out your space, know what you have, who has borrowed it, when it will be returned, how it's being used

COMMUNITIES of TRUST

Friends, lots of them, engaging in many different ways, on many different platforms. And knowing that good fences make good neighbors!

portability

Modern civilizations make it easy to 'vote with your feet', to upgrade! The physical world is dominated by stories of people picking up and moving to a better location.

Contrast that with 20th century communism, where you couldn't leave without threat of death. The digital social world looks more like East Berlin, with digital walls to lock you in, by stifling competition and keeping digital communities segregated.

Social media privacy, portability & competition

Paths to the Digital Home

There are several paths to DHI, both have great chances of success. The regulated path would accelerate adoption, similar to the adoption of aqueducts in Spain driven by the Roman empire.

In both scenarios, early adopters will have advantages in the early stages of adoption as the gory details of the required standards are ironed out via a Digital Home Standards Board, a body of industry participants patterned after the North American Energy Standards Board. Ultimately the DHSB standards could be adopted and/or enforced by the FCC or other government bodies.

organic adoption

Grass roots adoption of DHI by 2nd-tier social networks establishes an ecosystem of social networks that provide today's social media consumers with the promise privacy, portability and competition of DHI, while also positioning them to compete better against the giants. With moderate momentum the grass roots efforts could inspire the 800-pound social media giants to adopt the DHI frameworks.

regulated adoption

Government agencies may force the 800-pound social media giants to adopt DHI frameworks, creating the ultimate ecosystem of social media and consumer privacy.

Industry-driven standards and innovation

DHSB Digital Home Standards Board

The standards of the DHI are built and maintained by a group of industry professionals who voluntarily serve to advance the requirements of digital homes, privacy and competition.

Not yet established, the DHSB could be patterned after numerous standards bodies, one successful model being the North American Energy Standards Board, an organization tasked by FERC to develop energy standards used in natural gas and electricity.
 
The DHSB will target “lowest common denominator” standards: bare-minimum requirements to achieve the goals of DHI, without taking away ability for members to be successful and profitable.
 

DHSB Proposed Standards

B2B Rules

Rules governing the business side of Digital Homes: how social networks work together to achieve the Digital Home, and responsibilities in this new Digital Civilization!

API Standards

The REST / JSON standards behind the B2B interchanges between social networks, including data envelopes and payload structures

Voice & Video interop

Standards needed to connect different voice and video protocols adopted by DHSB members