Thinking about an issue I need to solve for myself I started thing about all things free. Most things online are free, supported with marketing. All it requires is acceptance of Terms & Conditions be they what they may. This causes a problem. Not for me or you but for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. They will never be able to access the accounts we blindly use with out thinking about the long term view and our relationship with the data we all create. I am company agnostic in this regard: they are all guilty of manipulation human nature for profit. And thats ok, for now. But what about my information a hundred years from now? The corporations won’t care. I hope and try to parent to create a future generation that will care about the things I have learned and things that shaped and guided me and provided the vibrant color in my life. And if they do, how will the get glimpses of that color? Understand how some things in a hundred years are different to the point of alienation yet others remain as constant as the mountain top that beckons me to walk up and ride down. So here is the rough dump of my thoughts on this software:
- I have lots of data sources, some with PII (Personally Identifying Information):
- Photo software databases
- Email archives
- Documents
- Social Stuff Online: Twitter, google, bitbucket, etc, etc
- Personal website for brain dump and grandparent kiddo photos
- I need a simple text box entry point that will return google esque search results from just that data set, organized by:
- Date(s)
- Places
- Photos
- Videos
- Text
- It will require:
- A service to index, scrape and store the assets
- An interface to interact and modify (meta) data as I wish
- Security & Account Management
- Ability to mindlessly grant/admin access to ‘layers’ of digital me. This is pretty rough:
- But by default everything is private, even if I let you log in.
- The interface lets me find and move sets of assets to concentric circles of access with all of ‘Digital Me’ at the center.
- For some folks, like my wife, daughter (when she is old enough) the can add to me
Here is the why. My wife and I updated out trust and last year and it got me thinking about the 1.5 TB of data I have collected in the past eleven years. Think about the substantial level of PII and PRI (My own term: Personally Relevant Information) that is useful to the ‘Family’ circle is huge there. This raised some questions I want the above software to be able to answer:
- How will my daughter answer questions like what was Matts favorite childhood memory? Who were Matt’s grandparents? Where were they from? Most of those answers are in my data … but not accessible
- How will my daughters grandchildren answer these questions? I can’t easily answer them for myself with out a lot of time and effort to find the right relative to ask. In fact I have asked some things and enjoyed learning the history of my family but forgotten about it. If only my great grandparents could have had the tools I have today - the insight into forces that shaped my family, me is a compelling idea for me.
Obviously this is a tall order. I used to think that other much smarter people, who made successful technologies and sometimes millions, would think of this and I could pay them to use their tools. Alas, nothing that I know of has come to the forefront. If they can build giant robotic farms that scrape the content of the internet, surely I can build a tool that help and extends introspection for myself.
