point well made about usability - it's KEY to making Murmurations work - and the last thing I want to do is put barriers in place which might make things harder for any user.
how would you minimise the barrier for individuals & 'Regenerative Economy orgs'?
Individuals and Regen Econ Org will simply need to click a check box to agree with the Principles (when submitting their JSON profile to the Index) so no more onerous than 'joining' any other site really.
The API Key idea only applies to Aggregators who want to pull info from the Index to create maps, directories or news sites... and all they would need to do is log on to Murmurations, provide an email address and create a Public Private Key pair and submit these when requesting access to the Index API... This is exactly the same process Web Masters need to do when the connect, for example, their Mailchimp to their Wordpress, so it's a well know and simple process. I'm guessing most Aggregators are actually be a bit more geeky than your average WebMaster so it should be a breeze for them 😉
Do you really anticipate a for-profit scraping
Absolutely YES, if Murmurations ever contains any info which is open and which Google (and others) do not have they WILL scrape it and use it for their commercial gain!
Can you illustrate this concern better?
Another great question - yes, sorry if I was not entirely clear...
One example is Illustrated by my friend Tony over at The Ripple Foundation - who built a very useful open protocol for healthcare... but did not find people to be naturally reciprocal... so his Open EHR system struggled to sustain itself:
so long as 1/10 see the bigger picture and is willing to give back. But our recent experience is that 10/10 are taking, without consideration for the ongoing maintenance of the open source tools they are leveraging and that is simply not sustainable.
Another good example would be when Google try to scrape the Murmurations index add add all the info to their Knowledge Graph ... now they can profit directly from our hard work and code by delivering better search results ... and selling more adverts etc... if however, we require Google (or any other agent using the Murmurations Index for commercial gain) to buy a license (API Key) to access the Index we protect ALL our data from exploitation - because we own it and define the terms on which it can be used. (At some point in the future we could probably even enable every user to set their own permissions about how which bits of their data are used for / by every different Agent - ala the 'data licenses idea illustrated in my PLANET concept - See the "Deliverance" screenshots on this page) But as well as protecting our data, requiring commercial Agents to buy API Keys we also create a business model, via which Murmurations could potentially fund its server costs and development and more - which will be essential if this is going to fly 😉
Finally the API Key concept wraps Murmurations in the kind of 'semi-permeable membrane' David and Silke talk about ...
Semi-Permeable Membranes are what the boundaries of a Commons should be. Like other living social organisms, Commons need to protect themselves from external forces that might harm them while remaining open to flows of nourishment and signals from the environment. Therefore, a commons functions best if it develops a semi-permeable membrane for itself rather than a tight, rigid boundary. This flexible skin, figuratively speaking, both assures its integrity by preventing Enclosure and other harms while allowing it to develop nourishing, symbiotic relationships with other living organisms.
Which seems essential to prevent Murmurations becoming a "free for all" instead of a carefully governed commons.
Does that make sense?
I'd love to know what others think about this idea...?
Nathan recently pointed me to EthicalSource who seem to be working on similar ideas of using better, more appropriate licenses to protect web content and code from commercial exploitation.
Just a final note about your point
Murmurations is not really about content...
It really is - if you have an RSS feed in your profile I could track anything you posted via a suitable Murmurations aggregator ... and if a Schema Creator added a "knows" or "follows" field ... we could have a fully open Twitter / FB replacement running on the Murmurations Protocol. 😉
