Focusing Prototocol and Aligning Stars

I think only half jokingly, someone described what I do as reading the stars and turning it into a developer horoscope - That may be an uncomfortable, funny and yet perhaps all too accurate a metaphor. The above image was perhaps an attempt at one such astrological map I put together a little over a year ago ( I have since modified to update some technologies like OpenID and generalize the promise of federated ID - at the time of the original SAML and in particular Shibboleth were really on my mind)

I had just come back from Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (an interesting and enjoyable place) and had, after seeing works by folks like Nam June Paik and Exhibits like Algorithmic Revolution - On the History of Interactive Art, picked a a book  by Alexander R. Galloway called Protocol - how control exists after decentralization.  I was particularly tickled because the idea of control in distributed and decentralized systems is a core interest of mine.  The book turned out to be a mix of post modernist criticism, technological exploration and at times some over the top PC huey - all in all an engaging bit, well worth the read .  One particular quote struck me as very astute in capturing the pardox of autonomy as a surrender of control through the adoption of protocol.

It is a peculiar type of anti-federalism through universalism “ strange as it sounds“ whereby universal techniques are levied in such a way as to ultimately revert much decision making back to the local level." - Galloway

It was after reading this book and after considering a whole set of design patterns in the context of what "web style" decentralized control could mean that I sat down to read the stars.  I remembered too that having read Kauffman's Investigations, that for him the definition of life meant autonomy.  And that if you wanted to build something alive, and lay a foundation for an "architecture or participation" as some were calling it, then autonomy,  local decision making, had to exist.  The term, when I came across it, glocalization, had a particular resonance at the time as the kind of marketing Thomas Friedman like gooo that might stick to make this concept hold.

Well any way - the result was this idea that in a system whereby you could decentralized search and identity management and create the protocological agreements in order to allow for self decfriptive data (XML) to traverse these autonomous nodes - well you'd have something pretty darn interesting.  But i was hoping it would not be interesting in a Victor Hugo like way -  which is why  this discussion -

Authenticated Distributed Search (OpenSearch, OpenID) | Steven Wittens - Acko.net

Authenticated Distributed Search (OpenSearch, OpenID) I've been working on Drupal distributed search for a while now, releasing a beta of the OpenSearch Aggregator as well as a release of the OpenSearch feed module. The aggregator has a friendly UI for setting up any number of sources and the feed contains relevance information from the Drupal search system. Results are also cached on the aggregator for performance reasons.  More information about these modules can be found in my earlier blog posts about OpenSearch.  The ultimate goal however is to set up distributed search for a Bryght client between a network of secure Drupal sites. The searches for logged-in users should include content that is visible to them across all the different Drupal sites.

Is so nice to read on this fine morning. And although as Van Jacobson

clearly points to many other issues that we will soon have to face and solve its nice to begin to see the stars align.