Ethereum Swarm - Swarm Beta Event - On the importance of interoperability

i'm very honored to announce our opening talk for this event which is anti-boicola anti-develop solutions for the open collaboration between citizens and the public sector organizations he's active in open data my data and cycling movements in finland and elsewhere his calling is to work with issues that make cities and urban areas better and more sustainable places to live in uh auntie are you here um can you please enable your webcam yes i am here should i call you yogi or should i call you andy yogi is good yes but i wonder my video is not visible so maybe no that's um that's not good um i was hoping to see your face yes okay now we see you so um yogi please go ahead and i'm happy to give you the screen okay thanks a lot so let me see can i share my slides here also i think i have no rights for that okay here i i see them okay good um so as introduced my name is anthony yogi boycola i'm a member of my data global an association that seeks to uh give people access and and control over their own data so i am very pleased to be here with you in this uh swarm beta launch event uh i'm gonna tell you a little bit of of my data uh what it is and uh then our journey of interoperability that's that's kind of the message that i want to pass to you all so there are lots of technologies being developed at the moment in the world for also for more human-centric uh personal data and sovereignty of people and it is crucially important that all of the developers also kind of see the bigger picture and try to make the solutions work together because otherwise we cannot be uh reaching the human centricity so my slides are online you can find them from this short url maybe somebody can even copy it for to the chat so yes a little bit of my background so i'm serving the board of my data global association as the vice chair and i've been developing this concept of uh human-centric personal data now for the last i would say maybe eight years starting 2012. and i'm from finland i live in helsinki and i'm happy to acknowledge that my data was mentioned in the finnish government agenda already five years ago and now it is being acknowledged by the european commission in the data strategy so uh there is a little little bit of political lobbying uh here happening so i guess that most of the audience here are uh most mostly from the technical uh side and uh i'm also slightly technical but i i tend to uh call myself as digitalization lobbyist and i think we all need to uh work together to get the best technologies out into use so there is influence and politics are important in that case as well so my data global is a non-profit it has roughly 600 members individual members and organizational members it has members from 50 countries and over 20 local hubs reaching from from australia and japan to to silicon valley and brazil most of the hubs are in europe and we have four thematic groups and some of the topics that i will be touching today uh are coming from the thematic group called my data operators so coming back to that soon but anyways first my data it's a human-centric personal data management idea for that so uh organizations and initiatives are independently uh converging towards similar ideas about personal data infrastructure management and governance where the people themselves would be in the driver's seat regarding the use and sharing of data from them and about them so i'm quite sure that most of the folks here in this uh launch event also uh feels like being on this same boat so my data global association has its aim as fair sustainable and prosperous digital society through a human-centric approach to personal data and we believe that this would give people should get value from their data and and people should set the agenda on how their data is being used and this would be at the same time uh also organizations would the ethical use of data would be always the most attractive option for the organization so we are trying to reach this balance in the world and if you go online you will find the declaration of my data principles on mydata.org declaration so we have identified three big shifts that should happen in the world so that we can get there so we need to move from formal rights to actionable rights so everybody knows uh perhaps the gdpr uh and new kind of regulations that are coming popping up uh in europe and in other parts of the world it's good it's great we have the data protection regulation but that's not enough if it's not uh actionable for the for people for example in the uh gdpr regulation in europe there is a article 20 that says that we should get our digital uh data in in machine readable format uh fine that's great piece of legislation but we need to have the tools to actually make that right uh useful for people and then uh other shift is that we need to move our mindset from uh data protection only to empower people with their data so it's not uh well you can say that people who are locked in in a jail are very safe and protected nobody can hit them and they are not suffering from bad weather uh but anyways they are not empowered they are not free so uh i think we need to keep on having the good data protection but also climbing up to to the letters of giving people the benefits from their data and this means that technically we need to move from close to opening ecosystems interoperability on technical level and also business-wise and here is an uh illustration of the point uh from moving from data protection to to empowerment with data so in the old world we had only paper documents which were not so good for uh using personal data it was useless basically and also the data protection wasn't so good now we are moving in in europe for example to strong data protection regime that's quite uh that's great then here on the left side you see the big uh data giants that everybody uh dislikes they are using lots of data and we think that my data should be the way to have the strong data protection and also let people use their data for their benefits so people would decide so we would get the both both sides uh using data and having good protection and how to make make it happen and make it right this is a slogan that we often use in my data so we want want to make this kind of human-centric uh personal data infrastructure and world to actually happen uh coming out from the labs and out from the small initiatives to so that it's for everyday use for everybody but at the right at the same time it needs to happen so that we don't kind of end up renewing some of the problems that we are having in the current data economy or even creating worse problems so we we need to make it happen and make it right at the same time and for that we are working on on three different levels in my data so i think the most uh important part for us in my data global is the infrastructure i come back to to uh tell a bit of of the my data operators soon but we believe that there will will be uh organizations that offer the human centric data management infrastructure uh and those organizations who offer it they will use some sort of technologies and standards and here we come to swarm for example i believe that there will be uh decentralized uh interoperable uh globally accepted standards for many of the things that we need to in order to build that infrastructure if the infrastructure that we rely on if it's close uh closed and proprietary it's not safe and scalable and then climbing up is is the question of governance so who decides who decides and who decides who decide uh and it may be that um some of here uh think and rightly say that there shouldn't be we should not uh have the organizations like uh trusted intermediaries we should uh create good standards and that's it uh i might that's my personal opinion uh that we eventually anyways there is somebody doing decisions there is some group of developers there is some community there is somebody who governs the decisions that we make and this governance structure should be made visible and transparent so that we we can uh guarantee that the human-centric principles are followed so now i will tell a few words about my data operators so uh we are living now in in this kind of api ecosystem so many of the services that we use on daily basis they are somehow maybe connected with some other services everybody talks that there should be apis fine but apis are always provided and governed by those organizations that actually set them up and they may close them any day or change the design so that the other services get broken so this is not very reliable model uh not not good for people we don't know where our data is flowing and it's it's not good for for the developers either so what what's happening now is that some of the big ones they are starting to kind of create these mega platforms that connect all sorts of data from our health to our mobility to our finances and make it easy to access and create applications but they they are uh having this unitary uh point of uh control which is not good uh so uh we believe that the world should be show that so that individuals are the connection points for data uh related to their life so that uh if somebody wants to develop a service that would be beneficial for me and would need my data it would be enough for that party to come and ask from me i could give these permissions but that should be made so that we don't burden individuals under under responsibilities so so that it's reliable and trust trust worthy system without individuals being completely left alone okay these kind of mighty operators they are continuing uh the story of so-called trusted intermediaries which has been developed since uh 90s with different names infomediaries uh vendor relationship management life management platforms etc and now also more recently data trusts and cooperatives i think that many of you are thinking now that why the heck do we need this new intermediaries uh in the full des centralization it would be okay also individual to be their own self operator but in in my data we look at uh we don't say that it's the it's the only way to go that there is full decentralization or nothing at all uh we see that there is uh kind of shades of tray and different ways to get there and we we want to study what's common there and make the intro interoperability between the different systems so uh currently uh data is being collected managed and used in in silos in one company and with this kind of uh intermediaries where the individual would be in control uh we see that the same data could be used in different services i could give my let's say loyalty card data to get better recommendations or uh counting my co2 footprint or uh whatnot but it should be always me making the decisions and and it should be as easy to withdraw the decision as as to give give the permission and we see these operators working in ecosystems where they are interoperable so like i if if you give my me your phone number i can call you because the phone operators all around the world they share the common standards and and they have the interoperability between them but if you uh if you look at the current day systems like facebook's and whatsapps they are not interoperable between themselves so uh we see that these my data operators should work as a network like we have network of uh tele operators or networks of banks etc i i will speed up a little bit in this year we published the white paper on understanding my data operators and we we gathered roughly 50 organizations that are building this kind of uh infrastructure right now from 15 countries and we approached these organizations that we knew could qualify as protools we requested them to read and comment on the paper draft and subsequently indicate if they wish to be included as proto-operators so we have this live community of organizations that are actually doing it and and i'm welcoming you to join if you feel that you are developing some uh critical technology on this area so this is just a slide of of these different organizations from different countries and there are many hopefully some familiar names also we when these organizations they shared what they are doing uh we developed this my data operator reference model for describing nine core functional element elements of of these operators and here you see those uh identity management we need to know who is active in the network permission management uh how can one give and retro permissions we need to have the end points for the services where can we find them there needs to be some sort of value exchange maybe in in form of monetary exchange or or some other tokens uh data needs to be interpretable at some level uh so there needs to be data model management and also personal data transfer it needs to move at some point between different services and personal data storage i think here it's really interesting what what swarm is developing for decentralized uh data storage and around this there is the governance support and logging and accountability and uh this interoperability part we are now moving on so that we have asked each and every one of those services to describe how they actually implement those nine uh modules and we are making people to communicate and compare so interoperability happens on technical level uh it happens on semantic level so that we actually understand the data it happens in legal level so that it's okay to move the data around and on organizational level and we should see it more widely than the technical interoperability only i will be skipping now since i know that i'm uh almost end of my time but i want to pass this uh journey of interoperability as as the mental metaphor for this community as well so uh we use it as throughout to lay the initial road map with minimum interoperability criteria for the operators and uh we start building from those minimum criterias upwards so uh interoperability is more art than science it's art of people and communities to coming together and actually acknowledging that there is a lot to gain when we work together and everybody needs to be a little bit of patient and be open for explaining how they see the world and want to make it happen so this is uh end of my story you can download the white paper if you wish mydata.org operators that's the uh link to to whitepaper and if this community is interesting to you there was the declaration we have the white paper and we have very active uh two to two and a half thousand people slack community and you can also join as a member if you wish so thank you very much uh and i'm pleased to hang around and hear what what else happens in this warm event