Hi Project
URL = http://hi-project.org/
Description
"The hi:project is a nonprofit, free, open-source engineering program formed to create a more human-centric web, open and accessible to all. Endorsed by the Web Science Trust, we’re currently building a community of interested parties, preparing to develop a technical proof of concept to demonstrate the potential of our vision.
The project helps:
- secure a citizen-centric Internet (redecentralizing)
- solve personal data & privacy
- transform accessibility & digital inclusion.
We do so by pioneering the human interface (HI), the successor to the user interface (UI)."
Status
Philip Sheldrake:
"The hi:project team is collaborating with others interested in trustworthy and empowering technologies. We’re working to launch the Digital Life Collective and we'd love you to be part of it.
Now for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of an ambitious, open-source, nonprofit vision such as the hi:project, I provide a fuller debrief below. For those who prefer their updates bitesize, everything you need is contained in the next six paragraphs.
...
You’ll recall the hi:project has some mighty challenges in its sights. We will help: solve personal data & privacy; secure a citizen-centric Internet of Things; transform accessibility & digital inclusion.
Just as for many free open source software projects, no-one profits with the hi:project but rather everyone because of it. And therein lies both the broad opportunity and the deep problem. If everyone secures the return on investment, if the profit cannot be privatised, who exactly is going to make the investment?
In other words, markets aren’t designed to address such particular potential, but that hasn’t stopped us appealing to commercial players – more on how that works below. Moreover, it doesn’t seem foundations can fund and foster such fundamental architecture. And our brush with academic funding was a brush off. In all, we’ve been working across four fronts, failing at these three, and seeing if we can succeed at the fourth.
At first the fourth appears counter-intuitive ... if the hi:project seemed too big, fifty of us have banded together so far to go bigger. The Digital Life Collective is a co-operative dedicated to “tech we trust for the world we want”, and today is the day we go all official. Today we put the incorporation paperwork in the post and invite you to become a co-founding member so that together we can give the market a miss for the moment, pause the powwow with foundations, give up grinding the grant applications … and start simply co-operating."
Discussion
Towards the Digital Life Collective project
Philip Sheldrake:
"From the moment we started talking about the hi:project, we contrasted the user interface (UI) and the human interface (HI), the former describing the status quo in which you, the mere user, are actually the used, where you are in fact the product being sold, the civilian being controlled. By adopting HI as our terminology, we communicate the intent to reinstate your sovereignty, your dignity, your humanity.
In the ensuing four years we’ve witnessed a new type of UI emerge that feels sufficiently transformed as to warrant its own acronym. Some call them conversational interfaces, or intelligent personal assistants, or chatbots, which sounds ever so friendly. I prefer to name them after their primary function however … the surveillance interface (SI). Google Assistant. Amazon Alexa. Apple Siri. Microsoft Cortana. And Facebook appears intent on developing similar capabilities. The only thing more alarming than SI’s intrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things.
Very very few companies are positioned to offer SI because it requires a huge amount of context (the surveillance ideally pre-dates the SI), enormous computing power, and therefore an existing dominant position in the consumer electronics and web services marketplace. Consequently, our global digital infrastructure is further centralized – saying that half a dozen companies are left in the race is likely an overestimate.
And yet it’s tricky to convey the criticality of decentralization. In the here and now it seems irrelevant compared to the facility to utter “Alexa, play Sheeran’s Shape of You”. We were invited to write an article on the topic by the World Wide Web Foundation, and we hope the title alone does it justice: Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply.
We need to redecentralize the interface layer in ‘the stack’. We need to re-center things on you so you can chose to work with companies to create shared value rather than have them work on you. And we need to make sure everyone is invited."
More Information
Technology of, by and for the people. Our tech, not their tech. Find out more now at www.diglife.com.