The Thymo Alliance

Last updated 11:43 March 8th, 2010, London.

What is Thymo?
What is the Thymo Alliance?
Why?
Who?
Isn’t this just a privacy issue?
Founding members
Workstreams and outcomes

What is Thymo?

Thymo is a way for everyone to benefit from all the data we create as a product and by-product of our use of devices, networks and services. Currently, much of this data is digital debris of no value simply because we can’t tap it, store it, analyse or wield it.

We can each gain greater insight into how we live, how we use products and services, discover ways to improve our lives and business and government and environment, all whilst securing the data and respecting everyone’s privacy preferences.

What is the Thymo Alliance?

The Thymo Alliance is a not-for-profit membership organisation that defines the systematic, legal and cultural basis for the generation, format, collation, storage, aggregation, analysis, presentation and application of data relating to individuals’ ongoing relationships with all variety of organisations through their use of products and services.

It governs and certifies provision of such aspects, including but not limited to the technological architecture and protocols, security, privacy, data ownership and data portability.

For those familiar with David Brin’s “The Transparent Society“, we’re intent on building his second city, the city of trust, rather than his first, the city of control.

Why?

The Internet of Things refers to a network of objects not historically connected. We can consider four kinds of objects: the device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (washing machine, car, aircon unit); the electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (ceiling lighting, electric heater, power distribution); non-electrical objects (food and drink packages, clothes); and environmental sensors (for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture for example).

The Internet of Things is a multi-faceted IT led revolution that will impact commerce, government, education, entertainment, transport, healthcare, environmental management and the efficient use of finite resources; it will help humanity meet some of its biggest challenges, and throw up some new ones!

Example devices, services and data

Proprietary approaches

Proprietary approaches to collecting data from such objects cannot aspire to achieve a fraction of the benefit an open, customer-centric approach can deliver to the individual organisation and all stakeholders. The largest organisations may consider a proprietary undertaking technically feasible and even advantageous in some ways, but this is outweighed by the advantages of the open approach encompassed by the Thymo Alliance. Some of the most notable advantages are listed here:

  1. Most importantly, the technical aspects are just one of a number of critical dimensions to this challenge, the others including the cultural and legal ramifications, varying from one country and one legal jurisdiction to the next, and these alone make an in-house undertaking considerably more complex and expensive
  2. Proprietary approaches typically emphasise one stakeholder’s needs (the company delivering the product or service) over all the others, and this cannot at face value delight those customers and other stakeholders critical to the company’s business success, who will instead be attracted to the advantages of the more widely adopted and mutually advantageous open approach – or in other words, the company’s best interests are actually best served by focusing first on the customers’ best interests
  3. The consumer will want to know where she stands in relation to issues such as security, privacy and data ownership, and it will be a considerable convenience (and probably a relief) to a company’s legal and marketing communications teams to refer the customer to a widely applied set of definitions, policies and protections formed by the multi-stakeholder Thymo Alliance than explain and justify its own proprietary terms
  4. The Thymo Alliance builds an open and interoperable ‘ecosystem’ from which no shareholder will wish their company to be isolated.

Who?

Membership is open to all, including ODMs, OEMs, technology companies and other organisations operating in the following areas – personal computers and netbooks, phones and smartphones, IT and telecommunications networks and services, other consumer electronics / brown goods, software development, financial services, electronic payment services, consumer content production and distribution, consumer Web services, utilities, automotive, white goods / major appliances, home automation, retail, government and public policy, privacy, environment, analytics, sociology, academia.

Commercial members

The Thymo Alliance gives its commercial members the opportunity to contribute to and benefit from an open industry-wide approach to the policies and technologies required. Putting the Alliance’s outputs into action will help commercial organisations:

  • Get closer to customers
  • Grow better understanding of the ways in which their products and services are used
  • Divine new ways, new products and new services to delight customers and entice prospects, profitably
  • Enable the customer, the citizen, to join with the wider community to try and resolve some of our environmental and societal problems
  • Avoid the potential for the media and other opinion leaders to interpret a proprietary approach negatively.

There will always be a need to channel commercially sensitive information, such as calls from a device for preventative maintenance attention, or specific performance indicators related to warranty terms for example. Therefore, the Alliance’s approach will define the kind of data that can be routed privately, that will be effectively owned by the commercial organisation rather than the customer, yet employing the same infrastructure for the convenience of the commercial entity.

Isn’t this just a privacy issue?

No. The Thymo Alliance’s founding principles enshrine privacy, but the individual citizen / customer / user is just the first of our stakeholders. The others are equally important – the for-profit enterprise, government, not-for-profits, the local community (street, town, county, country), and not forgetting the primacy of the planet itself.

Privacy issues are sacrosanct, but as the ‘Outcomes‘ section below makes clear the Thymo Alliance looks at other legal aspects, and the systems and applications, and researches the wide-ranging sociological, environmental and governmental perspectives. So, whilst there are organisations out there dedicated to defining and protecting personal privacy, none are undertaking the mission of the Thymo Alliance. Rather, each will be invited to join the Alliance to bring its specialist expertise to the table.

Founding members

Founder members will be committing to the Alliance in advance of the launch in 2010. The founding members will:

  • Form the first Thymo Alliance Board
  • Approve the founding governance, mems and arts
  • Hone the draft principles, specific objectives and outcomes
  • Have the first opportunity to define and lead the workstreams
  • Be invited to participate in the public relations of the launch
  • Underpin their leadership in this area as market and technology visionaries.

Workstreams and outcomes

It’s clear from our discussions with the world’s major consumer electronics companies that it’s a good start to consider outcomes in terms of the systems, legal, cultural and environmental perspectives. One way to define the Thymo Alliance workstreams then is to consider these perspectives as four vertical streams overlaying the horizontal streams associated with each group of products and services (white goods, brown goods, automotive, financial services, retail etc.).

The outcomes described here are deliberately top level. The founding members will undertake to define them more closely, and the workstreams will then be honed to best deliver the outcomes.

Outcomes – Systems

The protocols underpinning the Thing’s electronics, its networking and associated low level data security and protection (the physical, link, network and transport layers) are the foci of organisations like the Digital Living Network Alliance, the IEEE, the IETF, the OASIS, the ISO, the American National Standards Institute, the International Society for Automation and the IP Smart Objects Alliance.

The approaches to and standards for identity management, authentication and federation are the domain of organisations such as the OpenID Federation, the Liberty Alliance and the OASIS.

Setting standards for identifying tangible objects in the supply chain is the obsession of bodies such as GS1, GS1 US, their joint venture EPCglobal, and CE-RFID.

The Thymo Alliance has no intention of duplicating any of these endeavours. Rather, we use the term “systems” here to encompass the integrated whole. The Thymo Alliance focuses on the application layer and the overarching systems architecture, compliance with which qualifies the device or service as Thymo Certified. For example:

  • How will the legal framework be manifest systematically? What is required and prohibited?
  • How will the system take advantage of the work and standards undertaken by the bodies listed above?
  • Will the Alliance’s approach prefer or require local storage or cloud storage, or will it be agnostic in this regard?
  • How should caching be governed?
  • How will users of the devices and services join them to their Thymo instance?
  • How will users set the Thymo configuration of devices and services easily, with no room for confusion or ambiguity?
  • How should applications for the users’ interrogation and use of their data be defined and delivered?
  • How should shared devices and services (eg, TV, heating, car) be treated?
  • How do we define and deal with the ‘household’ and other groupings of individuals?
  • How can users audit their Thymo instance to make sure it is defined and operating according to their wishes?
  • How should we manage those data streams to be routed privately and securely direct to the manufacturer or retailer?
  • What is the Thymo systems definition of “anonymised” for data use in the aggregate?
  • Should operational differences materialise between countries with consideration to the legal and cultural aspects, how will this be managed systematically for portable devices?

Outcomes – Legal

The legal outcomes of the Thymo Alliance are best described by analogy to the Creative Commons. This not-for-profit initiative seeks to wield existing copyright law to forge new licenses describing a gradation of rights asserted and rights waived to better serve the needs of a digital world. At the time of writing, the original US licenses have been translated into the legal frameworks of 55 jurisdictions, from Argentina to Thailand, with a further eight in development. There are six major licenses sitting in between the one extreme of full copyright, and the other extreme of exerting no rights whatsoever.

Given the scope of the Thymo Alliance, a similar range of licenses will be required spanning as many legal jurisdictions covering aspects such as:

  • Whether any data collection and storage is required at all
  • Association of any level of identity to datasets
  • Whether device / service specific ‘engineering’ data is to be shared with the manufacturer / retailer / provider
  • Whether and how device / service specific customer use data is to be shared with the manufacturer / retailer / provider
  • The treatment of ‘households’ and other groups of users, and inter-group privacy
  • Sharing specific datasets with third parties for commercial purposes
  • Contribution of datasets to not-for-profit entities, anonymously or otherwise
  • Data retention, application and portability
  • Terms of service, service level agreements and recourse for breach.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.

Outcomes – Cultural

The cultural perspective is critical in a number of ways.

First, with the objective of establishing a consistent set of systems and licenses worldwide, the systems and licenses had better take into account cultural ‘eccentricities’ in all major markets, and this can only be achieved if we examine those local cultural norms and bring them to the table in the first place.

Second, the Thymo Alliance must respect the values of access, diversity and openness integral to the IGF.

Third, bringing the work of the Thymo Alliance to the consumer requires diligent, transparent and consistent marketing communications. (Indeed, this task is listed above, ‘Why?‘, as one of the drivers for companies to join the Alliance.) Successful communications spring from a foundation that acknowledges cultural nuances.

Fourth, technology changes culture. This will be as true for the Internet of Things as for the Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and mobile telephony revolutions for example. The Thymo Alliance will research, document and analyse the changes wrought by its work and the work of its members for consideration when developing future objectives, policies and plans. The ramifications for national and local government will command attention, and the Board may form its own ‘Outcomes’ section in this regard.

Outcomes – Environmental

The doctrine that capitalism and individuals’ quality of lifestyle are at odds with ‘being green’ is rapidly being turned on its head. Thought leaders such as Thomas L Friedman (“Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How it Can Renew America“) and Jeffrey D Sachs (“Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet“) demonstrate how adopting more sustainable ways of living and working can improve our standard of living, and create new markets and jobs, and attenuate the catastrophic impacts of global warming and pollution.

Saying that, this is not the place to make the case. However, for those who appreciate that technological innovation can (will) create winners across all stakeholders represented within the Alliance – business, not-for-profit, citizens, government, environment – the environmental outcomes will be keenly anticipated and eagerly tracked.

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