Issue Network
Concept Scheme
Issues
- Technically sophisticated people may be self-sufficient enough to hack their own private, non-protocol solutions, and thus discount the value of protocols.
- Who are these people with niche information needs?
- People with sufficiently niche information management needs have a problem such that there often is no "app for that".
- To enforce their platform monopolies, tech companies either obfuscate their content or retain physical control of it.
- People overwhelmingly believe that the current state of platforms and protocols is "just how technology is."
- Apps, platforms, and frameworks lend themselves to quasi-natural monopolies that levy a form of excise on the public.
- Don't protocols have owners too?
- Apps, platforms, and frameworks have owners, and every owner has an agenda.
- Even practitioners seem to gravitate toward platforms and frameworks.
- The public understands "apps", and a sophisticated subset of the public understands "platforms", but few understand "protocols".
Positions
- Target a group who is technically sophisticated enough to understand the value of protocols as well as articulate enough to explain it to those who are less sophisticated.
- Target (initially) people who are technically sophisticated enough to understand what a protocol is, but lack the skills to hack their own private, non-protocol solutions.
- Enlist UX designers and their close professional relatives.
- STRATEGY: Aim at business processes that diverge from/conflict with any extant vendor's interest to productize.
- STRATEGY: Aim at business processes that are not worth the candle to productize.
- STRATEGY: Aim at business processes that are siloed by vendors.
- Show the public that protocols are what make Alice’s app able to talk to Bob’s app, or Charlie’s app, or anybody else’s app, with no payola or even permission required.
- STRATEGY: Design an environment that subverts the need for "an app for that" by making it dirt cheap to make—or simply use—a protocol instead.
- If you could tell what the informational content being exchanged meant, you could operate over it using your own (or third-party) tools.
- People would demand more protocol-based solutions if they understood the role protocols play in facilitating interoperation while frustrating the formation of monopolies.
- Protocols are essential to a more equitable civilization.
- Protocols may have designers and stewards but they are generally appropriate for situations that are "too big to nail".
Arguments
- UX people are hungry for tools and coverage for their tool needs is sparse.
- UX designers and related disciplines have niche information needs and are highly articulate about the technology they use, though they do not exhibit the short-circuiting behaviour of developers.
- If people got a taste of how their information environment could function without the obstructive behaviour of platform monopolies, they would be loath to give it up.
- Protocols decouple processes from specific social and/or economic relationships.
- The learning cultures around protocols can be partly or wholly permissionless.
Concepts
- activity (statement)
- affordance
- architect (Cooper)
- client (process model)
- cognitive science
- composition (process model)
- computation
- computer
- conceptual integrity
- constraint
- customer (process model)
- design
- digital media
- engineer (Cooper)
- extension
- feed
- fitness variable
- form
- information ecology
- intension
- interaction design
- linguistics
- live document
- mathematics
- name collision
- opacity (information resource)
- persona
- post-industrial
- post-industrial process model
- problem-solving
- process
- producer
- programmer (Cooper)
- project scaffold
- protocol dysphoria
- reference catalogue
- scenario
- science
- semiotics
- social science
- software
- technology
- user