10 Design Principles for Future Technology Systems
So many organizations out there are looking for quality solutions for productivity and collaboration to scale their efforts; from CRM, project management, to information visualization tools generally. But quality systems don’t just happen on accident, and quality often means different things to different people. So what should we expect from future technology systems? How should they be built and evaluated? Having a framework, or a set of design principles can help guide the way.
To answer this need for accessibility-minded, non-technical and underprivileged communities alike, PLAN Systems is developing a self-hosted platform (very much inspired by Linux Torvalds, Mozilla, and Elinor Ostrom) that offers software infrastructure, along with a toolset of data visualization, collaboration, and privacy & accessibility capabilities foremost. Our team is harnessing the latest advances in p2p distributed systems, using open protocols and 3d graphics. These development efforts are guided by a rigorous set of design principles, which we would like to share in the hope that it will help others better design and evaluate systems as well.
Looking to Past Methods for a Framework
Elinor Ostrom traveled around the world to study and understand the process of how communities organize to manage commonly held resources. Ostrom presents a formal method of evaluating how communities self-organize, and also pointedly addresses the tragedy of the commons in her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. She was also the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.
The Internet Archive Elinor Ostrom – Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action : Elinor Ostrom : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts.
https://archive.org/details/ElinorOstromGoverningTheCommons
In proposing solutions to commons dilemmas (rather than relying on government oversight, privatization, or some other external means of control over the commons), Elinor Ostrom asserted a “cooperative strategy” for community management can also be used, whereby participants “themselves will work out” a contract that allows for productive outcomes (Ostrom 1990). In other words, Ostrom saw the critical need for an “analysts toolkit…whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts”.
What resulted from her study and analysis was a scientifically empirical framework to understand, characterize, and even catalyze the kind of cooperation necessary to allow communities to survive and thrive in their environment, despite potential tragedies that have always seemed to abound. While Ostrom’s work has been refined and expanded over the years, the core principles she identified remain the foundation for successful communities.
Time Tested Community Design Principles
8 Design Principles for Managing a Commons (highly simplified)
1. The group and resources being managed have clearly defined boundaries.
2. Ensure to match rules governing the use of common goods to the local needs and environmental conditions.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. Infer the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities or hierarchies.
5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members behavior AND monitoring the common resources.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution, before they escalate.
8. Build responsibility for governing the common resources in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.
“Organizing is a process; an organization is the result of that process.”
― Elinor Ostrom
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
10 Design Principles for Future Technology Systems
If Ostrom’s framework offers an effective way to maintain systems and structures within communities, could it be useful for digital systems as well? We think so. Following a set of design principles offers guidelines and provisions that can be coded against, and continuously improved through iteration and collaboration. That’s why we use a similar model for PLAN’s software design principles, adapted for a technical framework, in order to ensure we are serving privacy, accessibility, and future extensibility of the platform.
HOW IS PLAN DIFFERENT?
⏣ End-to-end Data Privacy and Ownership: Open source and distributed systems can lower barriers to entry for non-technical and underpriviledged communities to network, secure private data, and collaborate at a cost trending towards near zero.
⏣ Distributed Trust: PLAN protects against data loss, theft, spam and exploitation by harnessing the latest advances in encryption and distributed ledger technology, while not forgetting that it must also be usable by people with varying abilities.
⏣ Infastructure AND Interface: PLAN is an open platform, with integrated tools that facilitate communications, organization, productivity, and secure data storage. With the open source foundations of this infrastructure, new economies become possible again.
⏣ Accessiblity First-Class: PLAN Systems recognizes the need for non-technical, accessibility, and readiness minded communities to become digitally self-reliant, self-hosted, and offline capable — with an emphasis on interoperability and adaptability.
Although these may be nice features and statements of values, they are not a complete technical framework. Let’s dive in to learn more about the design principles that these features can arise from.
Considering PLAN is a platform intended to facilitate organization and digital trust, Ostrom’s principles are a great lens for understanding our approach to software systems design. PLAN design principles were developed as the technical underpinnings of the both the software architecture and necessary interfaces (GUI) which make the system usable.
| Principles & Definitions: |
| Total Data Ownership: components must provision for assured data accessibility + Data non-deniability + Data portability |
| Total Data Privacy: Boundaries well defined by a rigorous permissions schema; only the designated owner(s) have permissions authority and cryptographic access to their data |
| Community Centric Permissions: create/manage accounts + local authority + flexible (user-oriented) governance; rules governing use with nesting hierarchies |
| Offline First: Data accessible, usable, updatable all without the Internet; self-contained |
| Distributed Data & Infrastructure Redundancy: Integrated data backup/replication and recovery; concurrency of components, lack of a global clock, and tolerates independent failure of components |
| Spatial Experience: Integrated/full realtime 3D graphics capability with the full power of the workstation at your disposal |
| Hardware Agnostic: No technical, legal, or arbitrary restrictions on the number or types of devices |
| Accessibility and Usability: Adaptable for accessibility, usability, & intended for non-technical users |
| Pluggable & Extensible: Extend functionality natively; designed and offered with the intent that others can freely grow, enhance, or fork the platform |
| Gatekeeperless: Full source code may be used, modified and distributed— commercially or non-commercially. No third-party needed to deploy, access, or manage data. No costs, fees, or significant dependencies |
The design principles of PLAN are similarly voiced by Larry Sanger in a Jun 2019 article entitled Declaration of Digital Independence.
We free individuals should be able to publish our data freely, without having to answer to any corporation (gatekeeperless)
We declare that we legally own our own data; we possess both legal and moral rights to control our own data. (total data ownership)
Posts that appear on social networks should be able to be served, like email and blogs, from many independent services that we individually control, rather than from databases that corporations exclusively control or from any central repository. (distributed infrastructure)
Just as no one has the right to eavesdrop on private conversations in homes without extraordinarily good reasons, so also the privacy rights of users must be preserved against criminal, corporate, and governmental monitoring; therefore, for private content, the protocols must support strong, end-to-end encryption and other good privacy practices. (total data privacy)
As is the case with the Internet domain name system, lists of available user feeds should be restricted by technical standards and protocols only, never according to user identity or content. (accessibility and usability)
Social media applications should make available data input by the user, at the user’s sole discretion, to be distributed by all other publishers according to common, global standards and protocols, just as are email and blogs, with no publisher being privileged by the network above another. Applications with idiosyncratic standards violate their users’ digital rights. (designed to be pluggable and extensible)
Accordingly, social media applications should aggregate posts from multiple, independent data sources as determined by the user, and in an order determined by the user’s preferences. (community centric permissions)
No corporation, or small group of corporations, should control the standards and protocols of decentralized networks, nor should there be a single brand, owner, proprietary software, or Internet location associated with them, as that would constitute centralization. (data infrastructure redundancy)
Users should expect to be able to participate in the new networks, and to enjoy the rights above enumerated, without special technical skills. They should have very easy-to-use control over privacy, both fine- and coarse-grained, with the most private messages encrypted automatically, and using tools for controlling feeds and search results that are easy for non-technical people to use. (accessibility and usability)
– Larry Sanger, Declaration of Digital Independence
https://larrysanger.org/2019/06/declaration-of-digital-independence/comment-page-10/
But Larry forgot a few things! What about the not uncommon need for maintaining offline capable systems, hardware agnostic installation, or having an interface that can represent the environment (which is inherintly spatial and immersive)? Additionally, there is much work to be done in order to build the necessary infrastructure and interfaces that can support these values statements and expectations. Unlike common law, digital rights can’t simply be spoken into existence; they must be attentively coded.
We would love to develop our systems along side other community-centric organizations and non-profits that are looking for solutions for group collaboration, spatial organization, and privacy. Whether responding to crisis in real-time, keeping track of important records and files, managing relationships, or privately connecting with community members, it is paramount that data being exchanged is private, authentic, easy to use, accessible at all times, and sufficiently redundant. This is especially true for logistically complex humanitarian activities. PLAN Systems is dedicated to helping solve some of these significant challenges with thoughtful systems design.
Key Words: The Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Elinor Ostrom, p2p, distributed systems, design principles, Larry Sanger
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