Core Principles of the MAP

The design, implementation, deployment and operation of the MAP are committed to being aligned with the following principles.

Primacy-of-the-Individual

The preponderance of applications on the internet (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Uber, Twitter, etc.) are designed around the primacy of the application over the individual. They serve the companies that have created them. Each application offers individual user accounts and maintains its own information about that individual. Increasingly, they are gathering information about the people who use those applications with an eye towards then pushing recommendations, products, or services at them. If an individual interacts with multiple such applications, information about them is fragmented into each of these databases. Individuals have limited control over what information is gathered, how it is used and/or who it is shared with. The burden of keeping such information consistent, accurate and up-to-date falls to the individual. MAP reverses this picture by first and foremost serving the individual.

Individual Sovereignty

The rights of an individual to their own identity and the information associated with it are supreme, preeminent, and indisputable. This represents a radical commitment to the rights of the individual over corporations and governments when it comes to their personal information. Fundamentally, my personal information is mine. Individuals are the stewards of their own information and it is they who make the decisions about whether, how and with whom their information is shared.

Transparency

Collaboration, cooperation, and co-creation rely on transparent sharing of information.

There is a natural tension between these last two principles. The more I hide myself in a relationship, the less available I am for co-creation. Being more open makes more of me available to a relationship while also being more vulnerable. Per Primacy of the Individual, each individual is free and empowered by the MAP to find their own balance point between privacy and transparency and they can adjust this balance point over time.

Pull-rather-than-Push

This principle follows from Primacy-of-the-Individual. Just as individuals determine whether or how they share their information with others, individuals also determine whether, what and how others can share information with them. This principle does not prohibit all push notifications, because individuals can choose to subscribe to such notifications. But the MAP is designed to enforce the principle that all notifications honor the preferences set by the individual. This principle holds the potential to invert the dynamic of the attention economy where attention is limbically hijacked in order to sell it to organizations seeking to push their products or services.

Technology Serves Life

Although the MAP is a technical platform, it is not movitated by a belief there is a technological fix to the systemic crises we face. The MAP design is rooted in the principle that technology exists to serve life, not the other way around.

Self-Organizing

The MAP is intended to foster the emergence and evolution of self-organizing structures. Unlike designed systems where the concepts and relationships in the system are fixed and determined by the designer, the MAP allows new structures and relationships to be to be formed and dissolved. This has a profound impact on the design of MAP as it means that the platform needs to support discovering, recognizing, understanding, and interacting with agents, memes, services and resources in the wild -- i.e., whose existence was not presumed a priori in the design of the MAP itself.

Holonic Structure

The base (Level 0) ontology of the MAP is based on self-describing holons and holon relationships. Every holon is both part of a larger whole (itself a holon) and a container for other holons. In other words, every holon is both a part and a whole. Every object in the MAP is an instance of a holon. Every relationship in the MAP is an instance of a holon relationship. At this abstract level, holons and relationships form a node/link structure (graph) that supports navigation, search, visualization, modification and composition.

Self-Describing

This follows directly from the self-organizing principle. Living organisms must be capable of detecting, making sense of, interacting with, and sometimes defending themselves against novel phenomenon they haven't previously encountered. Accordingly, the MAP must support sense-making, meaning-making, and choice-making within and between agents without a priori knowledge of each other's existence. Thus holons and holon relationships carry their own descriptions.

Omni-Centric

Each holon is the root of its own holarchy. From the perspective of that holon, it is quite literally the center of the universe -- and the same is true for every other holon. The MAP adopts this omni-centric perspective. This is a radically different assumption from the application-centric perspective of the overwhelming majority of applications that exist today.

Every Relationship is Reciprocal

This principle is based on the fundamental interconnectedness of all differentiated forms. For any relationship, R, between two holons, H1 and H2, adding H2 to the relationship with H1, simultaneously adds H1 to the relationship with H2. For example, if an Agent signs a Declaration, that Agent is added to the set of Agents who have signed the Declaration and that Declaration is added to the set of Declarations that the Agent has signed. Note that saying the relationship is populated is a separate matter from whether and to whom that relationship is visible. The visibility of these relationships is subject to authorization policies and agreements.

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Last updated 1 year ago