[…] conceptual Inertia. It’s relatively easy for software developers to imagine and implement incremental improvement to the status quo. But before developers can create a new innovative system (or users can ask for one) they have to be able to envision it and have a vocabulary for talking about it. So, I’m going to coin a term, Personal Digital Habitat, for an alternative conceptual model for how we could integrate our personal digital devices. For now, I’ll abbreviate it as PDH because each for the individual words are important. However, if it catches on I suspect we will just say habitat, digihab, or just hab. >> inertia pdh habitat
A Personal Digital Habitat is a federated multi-device information environment within which a person routinely dwells. It is associated with a personal Identity and encompasses all the digital artifacts (information, data, applications, etc.) that the person owns or routinely accesses. A PDH overlays all of a person’s devices and they will generally think about their digital artifacts in terms of common abstractions supported by the PDH rather than device- or silo-specific abstractions. But presentation and interaction techniques may vary to accommodate the physical characteristics of individual devices. >> identity
People will think of their PDH as the storage location of their data and other digital artifacts. They should not have to think about where among their devices the artifacts are physically stored. A PDH is responsible for making sure that artifacts are available from each of its federated devices when needed. As a digital repository, a PDH should be a “local-first software” system, meaning that it conforms to: […]
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Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!), October 2019, pages 154–178. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737