Silona Bonewald: Open Banking, metrics and money

The following entry entitled Open Banking, metrics and money and posted by Silona Bonewald on Friday, September 25th, 2009 to her blog, Persona Prime:

metrics metrics metrics

With an openbank I get to prove a concept with the most old fashioned metric there is – money…

for what is money than the most generally accepted metric?

I want to educate people about the ownership of their data. No better way than to attach it to their money.

Show them that Data is the new money.

No better way to prove to businesses that people care than to make alot of money off of it.

No better way to get other banks to follow suit than to take money away from them.

yep I am a bit of a more pragmatic gal these days…

Here's my comment ....

Silona,

Truly, data is becoming more and more the 'new money' ....

Data ownership matters because it holds forth the promise of empowering people with much more technological and political control of their information than that provided by conventional information technologies and legislated confidentiality protections.

Give people the opportunity to profit or otherwise benefit from their data products in the form of granular objects, and their valuable data will, ironically, become more accessible to all. Give people the opportunity to familiarly bank their data like they bank their money, and watch the political dynamics shift favorably toward a more data transparent, and data secure, world.

First, there was money. Then there came the banking of money. Now is the time for the Information Age to shift into a Data Banking Age full of new services, and new opportunities, not unlike those brought to us, and facilitated by, our very successful monetary banking systems.

But lest the reader thinks that you and I are too much out in 'left field', or that we are being too idealistic, I'd like to cite what Microsoft and the Information Card Foundation are currently doing that is bringing a realism to the idealism.

Windows CardSpace (aka Microsoft Information Cards), part of the .NET stack, is Microsoft's client software for the Identity Metasystem, an interoperable architecture for digital identity that enables people to have and employ a collection of digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. When an Information Card-enabled application or website wishes to obtain information about the user, the application or website requests the publication of a particular set of claims authored by the user. The CardSpace user interface then appears, switching the display to the CardSpace service, which displays the user's registered identities. The user selects their InfoCard to verify their identity.

Kim Cameron, Chief Identity Officer, Microsoft, is seeking to extend Microsoft's Information Cards with 'minimum disclosures' (that is, claims granularly derived from Information Cards). See "Proposal for a Common Identity Framework: A User-Centric Identity Metasystem" by Kim Cameron, Reinhard Posch, Kai Rannenberg on October 9, 2008.

The granular control of identity in the form of claims is, I suggest, a form of 'data banking', and a form of technological 'data ownership'. Microsoft's CardSpace is now officially being marketed in the context of the 'Geneva Framework', a Claims Based Access Platform. By marketing its Geneva Framework, Microsoft is bringing data banking and data ownership closer and closer to the mainstream.

If the reader is interested in further reading, and hyperlinked citations, see my blog posts Banking on Granular Information Ownership and A User Centric Identity Metasystem.

[This comment previously posted in two parts to a version of Silona's blog post shared to the Data Ownership in the Cloud networking group on LinkedIn - http://tinyurl.com/datacloud]