draft from upcoming presentation on The Mine Project:
The Mine! approaches Identity, Data and Privacy in a manner that differs from the “Social Web” – it presumes that the user should be empowered, and is ready to take a role as a equal participant in the web. It changes the user from being a profile page in someone else’s silo, to being an autonomous node able to participate directly in web protocols.
[In a Mine] the user “owns” their raw data and its analytics in a sense which is simultaneously centralised of management yet distributed of access. In one sense the Mine seeks to draw the user’s data together and centralise it for processing in a manner reminiscent of the dawn of the personal computer – all of your data, in one place, private, for your own computational purposes – but in another sense it is fully web-enabled, that any item of data can be shared flexibly and instantly, to whatever end.
The web, to date, has been served up for the user as a series of “browser experiences” – kiosks through which you can access and occasionally *buy* information; blogs were the first cracks in the dam towards ubiquitous information publishing, primarily of text.
There is difficulty in predicting what the future will look like in a world with empowered users who can control sharing of anything with anyone – but since PCs unlocked data from paper prisons and allowed people to spreadsheet it, sum it, graph it and draw it, sharing the results on floppy disks, we expect the Mine (and solutions like it) to change the way people perceive their position in the world, no longer “consumers at kiosks” but instead people sharing and participating on equal footings.
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