IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 49

pen Mustard Seed
(OMS) is a project
of the Institute for
Data-Driven Design
(ID3) and the M.I.T.
Media Lab that seeks to develop
new social ecosystems consisting of trusted self-healing digital
institutions operating on open networks. The cornerstone of OMS is
an open data platform that enables
people to share all their personal
data within a legally constituted
"trust framework." This framework allows people to initiate their
own "personal data store" (PDS)
that can securely store and process static and dynamic data about
themselves. All elements of the
trust framework - open authentication, storage, discovery, payment,
auditing, market making, and monetized "app store" services - are
based on "privacy by design" principles. That is, privacy, security,
and trusted exchange are built into
the very design of the system itself.
It is important to make these
principles a functional reality in
digital networks if we are going
to unlock the great stores of latent
value that open networks hold. As
postulated by Reed's Law, the value
in a network increases exponentially
as interactions move from a "broadcasting model" that offers "best content" (in which value is described
by the number of consumers N) to
a network of "peer-to-peer transactions" (where the network's value
is based on "most members," mathematically denoted as N2). However,
by far the most valuable networks
are based on those that facilitate
group affiliations. When users have
tools for "free and responsible association for common purposes" the
value of the network soars exponentially to 2N [1].
However, the latent value of
"Group Forming Networks," or
GFNs, as David Reed calls them,
cannot be accessed unless there is
an appropriate network architecture
and associated platforms and tools.
We need a network architecture and

software systems that can facilitate
the formation of trust and social
capital in user-centric and scalable
ways. This is particularly important
as more sectors of commerce, governance, and social life are shaped by
large databases of personal information whose opaque uses are causing

Design of Open
Mustard Seed
There are two key building blocks in
the architecture of OMS: the Trusted
Compute Cell (TCC) and the Trusted
Compute Framework (TCF).
The Trusted Compute Cell can be
considered a cell unit (see Fig. 1) that

Privacy, security, and trusted
exchange are built into the very
design of the system itself.
legitimate concerns about data security, personal privacy, and social trust.
OMS seeks to let individuals
negotiate their own social contracts
regarding the uses of their personal information. By providing
a consent-based platform to manage data directly and responsively,
OMS enables, by design, the emergence of new sorts of effective,
quasi-autonomous governance and
self-provisioning. And it achieves
these goals without necessarily or
directly requiring "government" (as
opposed to "governance"). Online
communities working in welldesigned software environments can
act more rapidly, and with greater
legitimacy, than conventional government institutions. In this article,
we give examples of such collective action in three social use cases:
data sharing in local neighborhoods,
exchange of digital assets (in particular crypto-currencies), and massive
(even planetary) scale data sharing.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

individuals control in order to specify
and implement their personal data
preferences in networked computing.
A TCC can be replicated, conjoined
with other cells, and enhanced with
capabilities that are context-specific.
It helps to see the TCC from the
perspective of the social functions it
seeks to provide (as a service) to its
owner. When the owner of a TCC is
an individual that represents himself
or herself in the virtual space, the
TCC acts as an identity manager, personal data manager, registry of his or
her connections (to other TCCs), and
an applications execution manager,
among other functions.
When a TCC is created to serve
as an organizational unit (e.g., social
group or digital institution), the TCC
has the capability to provide services
that pertain to groups and groupbehaviors. In this case, the TCC
establishes a group-identity, and also
performs membership management,
collective data store management,

(1) RM = Registry Management
(2) IM = Identity Management
(3) PM = PDS Management
(4) CM = Compute Management
(5) AM = Applications Management

PM
Trusted Compute Cell (TCC)
Fig. 1. Components of the TCC.

FALL 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014