Digital Contracts : Addressing Legalese

A kind of smart contract, but with interpretive rather than governance goals.    This was an early goal of 'hypertext' within our enterprise.  You could define terms with a link as much as you wanted within a document.   But we soon understood that many definitions varied over time, requiring maintenance, had varying definitions in context, and in some cases needed pages of definitions and explanatory examples. 

When I click 'agree' now, I often wonder about the risk involved.   Never spelled out personally for me.   Or my organization in it's context.   I like Pinker's definition: " .. legal language often appears convoluted because it cannot assume the levels of trust and mutual understanding that inform most other types of communication ... " 

Fighting Legalese with Digital, Personalized Contracts   By William Pitt in the HBR

The cost of legalese in business contracts is high. Companies must hire expensive lawyers to write the stuff. Their customers often miss important information because — really — when was the last time you read every word of one of those privacy agreements before clicking “Agree”? And if those customers lose faith in those companies because they are surprised by what they missed, they can swiftly air their grievances on social media.

The problem is widespread, affecting a broad swath of industries and functions including real estate financing, content licensing, consumer finance, residential leases, consumer warranties, and insurance.

For some decades, the most commonly touted solution has been the conversion of legalese into plain English. Unfortunately the magic wand with which to achieve this conversion has proved elusive;  companies are understandably reluctant to sacrifice legal certainty for clarity.  And there’s a reason for the trade-off.  As the linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct, legal language often appears convoluted because it cannot assume the levels of trust and mutual understanding that inform most other types of communication.  .... "

Berners-Lee on Past and Future of the Web

Agree, if only for the construction of the Wikipedia, it would have been worth inventing and Building the Web.   When we experimented with early hypertext knowledge storage ideas we started to see the value emerge, but had no idea what was coming. Not Utopia, but another world.

From Utopia to Dystopia, and Back Again   By Bennie Mols

Last year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and the "Nobel Prize of computing," for his invention of the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, "and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale."

Berners-Lee proposed what we now call the Web in 1989, while he was working for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland (his boss at the time called his proposal "vague, but exciting").

During the Turing Award Lecture he presented last week at the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, during the 10th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci'18), Berners-Lee led the audience on a passionate route along the past, present, and future of the Web; "From Utopia to Dystopia and back again?" as he called it.

Back in 1989, the same year in which central and eastern Europe were full of political turmoil—with the fall of the Berlin Wall as an iconic highlight—and in which the world was full of new political dreams, the World Wide Web that Berners-Lee envisioned was similarly full of dreams. He felt the Web should become an open, decentralized platform where everybody should be able to share information across geographic and cultural boundaries, allowing creativity and cooperation to bloom.

These dreams have only partly come true, said Berners-Lee.  As an example, he points to Wikipedia: "It's amazing that humanity has created something like Wikipedia. Only for this was it worth to have invented the Web."

In recent years, however, the Web has suffered some collateral damage, said Berners-Lee, who said he worries about the loss of control over personal data, the ease with which misinformation can spread, the personalization of political advertising, and the power of social media platforms.

"You can see these things as emergent phenomena that couldn't have been predicted from the original design," said Berners-Lee. "The way in which people interact with the Web is very complicated. We now have about the same number of Web pages as humans have neurons in the brain. We do not understand the brain very well, and therefore we need neuroscience and cognitive science; in the same way, we need Web science as a separate discipline. Web science can, along with the social sciences, help us to understand how the Web works. It can also help us to build better systems which lead people to be constructive."   .... "

The Pickle Index

Always liked the idea of a non-sequential novel.  It has been tried many times, never successfully for my taste.  Is it here now?

No relation.  InWired: 

The Pickle Index is a delightfully Weird, App-Driven Novel like no other. .... 

Through The Pickle Index—an app, a hardcover, and a paperback book—users enter into Destina, a dystopian world governed by pickle consumption. .... 

The fact is, The Pickle Index is not a traditional novel, nor is it a conventional app. When Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn set out to create the multimedia storytelling experience, they made a conscious decision to eschew hallmarks of design like accessibility and ease of use. Instead, they provide multiple entry-points into an intricate and immersive world. In doing so, they’ve reimagined what a digital literary experience can be. .... " 

First Web Site Went Public 25 Years Ago

Quite an interesting anniversary.  Tim Berners-Lee 1991 announcement of his Web Project.  Its interesting that one of the other primary components of the Web, the hyperlink, existed before then. We used it as a means to link text definitions, calling it hypertext, as early as 1983.

Hypertext is 50 Years Old

Ted Nelson used the word in 1965.   Much later, but before the Web, we commissioned its use for a knowledge management application in the enterprise.  Now most everyone uses the very simple concept daily.  Be grateful. Hypertext in the WP, which makes the WP possible.   Pioneered by Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart.

Removing the Underlines

Google removes underlines.  This is late news, but I am reminded of our early work with hypertext, before the browser, before Google.   For a knowledge management project.   Where was the link? At the underlined worlds.

Hypervoice from Hypertext

The next Internet Frontier? Wouldn't you like to have voice data searchable, findable and sharable, in any language?   Imagine podcasts, speeches and voice consumer comments, all linked together for easy reference and especially for semantic analysis.  Here is a good introduction to the concept and standards being worked, with additional useful links.  And  " ... Announcing the launch of the Hypervoice Consortium to provide a forum to define standards, capabilities and applications for Hypervoice conversations ...  "