WDYDWYD part 2
So I ignored the signs about identity. I waffled back and forth trying to create privacy on important things like home addresses while trying to maintain my brand. In a way I was forced into it. Whenever anyone hears the name Silona and they know me – they assume it is me. It’s a reasonable assumption. But when some students of mine discovered silona.ch, I realized I had more to do. Silona.ch was a porn site for a dominatrix in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately she never showed her face and hard dark hair and a similar build to mine. Everyone seemed to believe me that it wasn’t me but.. the seeds of doubt were there. I knew I had to work more on creating and preserving my own identity. And I was tired of addressing the issue – “no that isn’t me…”
So I gave up on privacy. For me it had become a lost cause. So many sites and agencies wanted my address and phone. It had accidentally been published. So many things depended on my SSN and name. I had already been stalked once and because of that Dad and I had done concealed handgun classes together. (Yes I own 4 guns. Yes I am a Texan and a military brat.) I realized privacy as secrecy was a thing of the past – it just took me awhile to completely accept it.
I know it’s hard. I mean I do large scale databases for a living.
So I went looking for a way to fix it… my first attempt was a royal failure. I realized things don’t just need to be available. They need to be equitable.
As individuals, the electronic medium was forcing us to be transparent to businesses and government but they did not have to report back to us.
I decided to strive to create more equitable relationships. Step was get government transparent… step two was business. But I didn’t tell many people. See in 2004 in Texas – most people already thought I was a little “unrealistic.” (to put it nicely.)
Recently though I refocused. Now I am focused on citations for government documents, creating citable data, and openbanking.
January 10th, 2011 at 5:15 am
Hello… from a fellow fan of government transparency, stable citability, semiotics, and other good things!
When I saw the citability.org premise laid out it made me think of an interesting feature in Freebase called as_of_time. I know from searching for “silona.org freebase” that you commented on their acquisition by Google (o_o) so perhaps you’ve heard of this API? But if not… it has the interesting property of being able to effectively rewind the whole corpus, getting the results of a query as if it were run back in time.
(See section “As Of Time Querying”)
http://www.freebase.com/docs/data/going_meta
I imagine that an unusually powerful citability demo could be built with an interface that used a Freebase-backed schema for the sections/pieces of government documents. Have you or anyone else considered this idea? (currently I get no hits for “citability.org freebase as_of_time”)
While Freebase is not open source, they don’t mind if you experiment in the sandbox. And although they clear the data out weekly you can just programmatically reload demo data when they do. Of course…given the “meta” nature of as_of_time in the graphd engine, “backdating” an edit time in an existing database is not offered, so each new upload would reflect new edit times. A real government project using this method would probably want to import their existing editing history and thus employ a mechanism like graphd’s, but not use Freebase itself.
Also: you seem to share some of my feelings about the tradeoffs of transparency and accountability. So I’d be very curious what you think of my Blackhighlighter project, if you have time to look at it! Feel free to send me any comments or send it on to anyone you know who might be interested.
Thanks!!!