IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 54

the desired global social impact.
Although electronic devices on the
user end somewhat satisfies the challenges related to data collection at
the person level, there remains open
some challenges with regards to the
storage of this data and the sharing
of personal data elements at a massive scale (e.g., billions of people)
while preserving individual privacy.
The OMS as a platform allows
the gradual scaling up of digital communities while preserving each community as distributed autonomous
organization (DAO). For example,
individuals who seek to share or trade
their carbon consumption data [15]
(as captured and measured by their
electronic devices) could store this
data in their individual TCC. Larger
units of communities of people (e.g.,
neighborhoods, towns, or cities)
could use a community TCC to collect certain data from participating
individual TCCs, possibly adding
a layer of abstraction to this data to
prevent re-identification of individuals. This organic pattern of the DAO
can be repeated as we scale up, using
the TCC as a common building block
for individual representation as well
as community representation.

Looking Further Afield
In the long term we hope OMS can
enable the emergence of new sorts
of effective, distributed autonomous organizations that are selfprovisioning and which operate on
the basis of social contracts that
are negotiated by its members. The
hope is also that the OMS project
can provide input into the technology industry, especially sectors that
develop products and services in the
data privacy and in the virtualization
spaces (software and hardware).
Looking ahead, we think that the
current notion of "layers" of the Internet will need to be expanded by introducing a new data-driven stack that
recognizes the role of data at various

granularities, provenances and functions. Such a data-stack should identify distinct layers pertaining to the
personal data ecosystem, the open data
commons, and digital institutions. The
TCC and TCF components (or layers)
within the OMS have begun to point
to the possibility of these distinct new
layers by architecturally calling-out
the functions intended for each.
Related to the data-driven stack
is the need for new data exchange
protocols that can deliver coalesced
data in the raw (or abstracted) with
the contextual semantics of its creation and intended use, together with
its terms of use as devised by the
data's source. In this manner data can
retain value at its inception - independent of its later consumers - and
can be stored and transported across
the Internet without losing any of its
original entropy.
Finally, another motivation for
the OMS project has been equitable
access to data. Not only is access to
accurate data important for a thriving
digital economy, but also fair access
by all legitimate parties is required to
grow the digital economy on a global
scale. As such, personal data must
be truly recognized and practically
treated as a new class of digital asset
[7]. Enabling a person's access to data
generated by his or her daily social
behaviors and interactions (by virtue
of their devices or online activities)
goes a long way towards this end.

Author Information
Thomas Hardjono is the Executive
Director and Technical Lead at the
M.I.T. Kerberos & Internet Trust
(MIT-KIT) Consortium.
Patrick Deegan (patrick@idcubed.
org) is the CTO and Lead Architect
for the Open Mustard Seed Project
within the Institute for Data Driven
Design (ID3).
John Henry Clippinger (john@
idcubed.org) is the Executive Director
and CEO of the Institute for Data

Driven Design (ID3). He is also Research Scientist at the M.I.T. Media
Lab Human Dynamics Group.

References

[1] D. P. Reed, "That sneaky exponential -
Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the power of community building," Reed.com, 1999; http://
www.reed.com/dpr/locus/gfn/reedslaw.html.
[2] T. Hardjono, D. Greenwood, and A. Pentland, "Towards a trustworthy digital infrastructure for core identities and personal data
stores," in Proc. ID360 Conf. on Identity (Univ.
of Texas), Apr. 2013.
[3] E. Ostrom, "Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems," 2009 Nobel Prize Lecture, Nobelprice.org,
Dec. 8, 2009; http://www.nobelprize.org.
[4] D. Bollier and J. Clippinger, "The next great
Internet disruption: Authority and governance,"
presented at ID3, 2013; http://idcubed.org.
[5] A. Pentland, "Reality mining of mobile
communications: Toward a new deal on data,"
in The Global Information Technology Report
2008-2009: Mobility in a Net-worked World, S.
Dutta and I. Mia, Eds. World Economic Forum,
2009.
[6] A. Pentland, Social Physics: How Good
Ideas Spread. Penguin, Jan. 2014.
[7] World Economic Forum, "Personal data:
The emergence of a new asset class," 2011;
http://www.weforum.org/reports/personal-dataemergence-new-asset-class.
[8] Trusted Computing Group, "TPM 1.2 specifications," 2011; http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.
org
[9] Trusted Computing Group, "Virtualized trusted
platform architecture specification (v1.0)," Trusted
Computing Group, TCG Issued Specifications,
Sept. 2011; http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.
org/resources.
[10] S. Berger, R. Caceres, K. A. Goldman,
R. Perez, R. Sailer, and L. van Doorn, "vTPM:
Virtualizing the trusted platform module," in
Security 06: 15th USENIX Security Symp.,
Vancouver, Canada, July-Aug. 2006; www.
usenix.org.
[11] J. Zic and T. Hardjono, "Towards a cloudbased integrity measurement service," J. Cloud
Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications,
vol.2, no. 4, Feb. 2013.
[12] A. Pentland, "Check and balances for Big Government," Scientific Amer., vol. 309, no. 4, 2013.
[13] S. Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system," Bitcoin.org, 2011; http://
bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
[14] Ven, "Ven is a global digital currency that's
easy to use and great for the environment," ven.
vc; http://ven.vc, accessed July 15, 2014.
[15] BPP, "Billion People Project (BPP)," billionpeoplemovement.org, 2014; http://billionpeoplemovement.org.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

FALL 2014

http://www.Reed.com http://http:// http://www.reed.com/dpr/locus/gfn/reedslaw.html http://www.Nobelprice.org http://www.nobelprize.org http://www.idcubed.org http://www.weforum.org/reports/personal-data http://www.trustedcomputinggroup http://www.trustedcomputinggroup http://www.usenix.org http://www.Bitcoin.org http://http:// http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://www.ven.vc http://www.peoplemovement.org http://billionpeople http://www.movement.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014