 You are already famous okay, and we're live and as part of the National Association of Realtors I'm here to make some remarks and as a scientist at the Media Lab law that MIT.edu is my own stick And we just heard a very compelling I think presentation about a good idea for how to how to Recombobulate the real estate industry so it's a well-functioning market by using a platform as the as the organizing process by which to bring the buyers and the sellers and the intermediaries together in a Rational machinable way It makes all kinds of sense part of the idea Preliminary idea still to some extent was to use a Provider that's called platform OS so I Googled platform OS just to see and it does look at a high level like functionally adequate for what you're saying and Because it's law dot MIT.edu and part of what we do is try to think about engineering the legal aspect So it supports and reflects the business dimension of the project and and and the technology that's being used I scroll down to proprietary rights and it says the under this agreement Platform OS which is a company owns all right title and interest in and to the services and documentation Blah blah blah blah and then there's some rights that are reserved to people I'm putting stuff on their platforms some of the examples were it's gonna be like YouTube in some way or like eBay in some way These are platforms that are sense makers for their environments in their markets. It could be but of course We always have to bear in mind. Well, who owns the platform? So the concept of a platform makes all kinds of sense on at that layer of the stack of the technology and what people see another layer of the Stack you could say in a business sense. It is the legal part and I think I'm joined by Thomas from MIT and one thing that he brought up earlier was Some this isn't so much of a technology problem. I mean there's technology involved and it has to be got right but there's a people and Relationships and incumbents and so forth one of the things that you know that it calls to mind is Who would be the coalition or if you will of the players that could get together initially to get the thing going? And how what would their relationship be to the platform provider is a good word that a provider of a service Maybe it would be one where they created according to open standards and and a more flexible technology capabilities that can be served by say platform OS as an example but are not Created in a way where they're inextricably tied for all time and the kind of subject to perhaps the changing decisions and wins and and Survival decisions of that platform, but could be swapped to different technology that would be one way to look at you know the sort of legal and governance layer of Sizing up and selecting the right technology. I'm sure this is all Kids in some ways. You can't see the room But we've got very seasoned experienced people in the industry here, but it doesn't go without saying so I wanted to highlight that partly as a segue into a few remarks I wanted to make and I want to I want to highlight and that legal dimension for using technology to help Transition the real estate industry. I want to put out there that I think identity might be the single most important thing to get Right in order to enable this some kind of fabulous vision of a platform and services and a functioning market that that works When I started When I was little my dad had a company for, you know, 20 years called custom call-and-service and it was an advertising company And you wrote a little and adds that local professionals could put in the local newspaper to advertise themselves So like insurance dentists and be fun facts There's a great writer about about dentists taking your kids to the dentist for the first time What is around in real estate was the major thing So you're getting ready to sell your house was going to stage and how do you find a someone to help a broker? How do you basic things about the API and and then they'd sell them to to brokers mostly and agents who would Buy like 13 at a time put their picture on it in their name and put in their local paper This fundamentally was an identity service and it was inextricably tied to location So he would only had this concept that for every town that he sold it to he would not So he was an exclusive and for at least one municipality around as a buffer would not sell that same column So the people wouldn't see the same thing and and he sold an exclusive that was geographically based to an industry that couldn't be more geographically based So I think looking forward and then later when I was in law school the way I kind of paid bills and you know By bear and stuff was title searches. So I just did tons of title searches It's a whole thing. We were just talking about in Massachusetts and Suffolk County, Middlesex If you go way back pre-revolutionary worry that these dusty leather bound volumes with his homes one way to talk about the property boundaries It's not so different today It's still terribly messed up to just identify what Location we're talking about idiosyncratic the jurisdiction and to the vendor Fast-forward a little bit. I was working as a council and state government for technology and we had a big big effort in the late 90s for GIS geographic information systems were flying planes over the Commonwealth and other New England states is happening around the country just to make sure we could have like unique designators for all of the land for assessment and for Natural resources and everything else And then fast forward a little more I come to MIT on a part-time basis in the 99 and I was in the Department of Architecture all the research was again an extricably tied to up to places So based on some of that background, I was thrilled when bill when bill invited me in 2015 to collaborate on this event He said DASA and we collaborated before he's at MIT alum one scalp real estate cafe The realtors are coming to Boston in 2018 Everybody's going to be here. This is our shot to kind of really convene people And so probably ten times a different hackathons and different classes when bill's been here I've kind of said and here's bill and bill who's coming to town in 2018 and the real Thursday We've been pumping this thing for years and I've had time to think about it. This is what I want to say I think for identity it would be useful to think about three things The parcel if you will or like lap long The property you know, let's just say the built stuff and the people Because they all start with P Okay, that's why And if you think about what identity means in those layers There's always going to be three kind of things a unique identifier of any type, but don't forget the word unique I just learned an anecdote that in one of the states the assessors Identifier the county assessors, which is the de facto standard for unique identifiers one of the states which shall remain nameless Unless you email me It was recycling the numbers so look if somebody kind of reads brutal it brutal And so like my god, so you can't do them with the thinking like how about nobody looks back Who cares like this is not systems thinking so at the technology layer kind of being truly unique identifiers It makes sense. I think another thing is the kind of in a sense almost like the role if you will so something that is That makes sense in context so for example it may be that may relate in the case of Build property to you know, how is it zone? Oh, this is a commercial thing. It's an industrial thing residential thing in the case of people it's a buyer it's a seller it's a broker it's a title insurer and And name you know things have names as well All of them don't but people have named like John and Sally Some some property certainly have named the name of them all so it's the Geneva Convention bus sit down What if you're a prisoner of war the three things you have to say or name rank and serial number these the core? Identifiers I would say for that feed into an identity system that can function But you kind of had me at unique identifier if we can just get a unique identifier You can stick metadata on and that can float as it needs to over time So let's fast forward a little bit open street map is something that I think is a good example of a direction to go Where there's something where you know Google is great Don't get me wrong, but something where Being pulled into a single vendor is fragile especially for such an essential sector The economy is real estate or for any sector the economy or core public sector function Having a little bit of distance there that you can map to and give you some flexibility to fail back to other vendors or have Competition or do it your own way if there's a if there's a if things unfold such that the real estate industry Let's go one way and others go another way Open stream that's good fast forward a little more now come the days of blockchain There's a project. I think many of you haven't heard of apparently just in chit chatting with a few of you called foam Just show again. Who's heard of foam? Okay So to just give you a quick sense of that foam is a Protocol for consensus-driven map of the world if you will and and You know blockchains involved they have some other ideas, but the big insight from that is every square meter of Space on earth on our planet has a short human readable alpha numeric That so it's completely unique It's disambiguated from any other and not capable of Self-inflicted harm like some people in the back office amazing I will just kind of recycle them or do other funny odd things that Conflicting them with the namespace in another place or all the other stuff we can do or changing the you know the Like the format or the standard of the data structure from time to time and it covers the entire earth Which is a good way to think from the beginning To so that it will work for a country and its borders change and all the other stuff So take a look at foam if you haven't seen it yet. It's a good example of how to start to graph with identity. Why bother? well, when I see presentations like the one we just saw about how to Reconceive in a rational and productive Actionable way of the real estate industry like it looking at what kind of platform could make sense of this What I started thinking about is what cool stuff could you do? And so you can always shave money off and that's critical and that's probably good enough But part of what's exciting for I think from a media lab perspective is new types of business models new types of relationships that could occur and in a more robust dynamic Innovation layer that could grow up around this we heard as an example in apps economy That would be great One type of interaction that the bill taught me actually many years ago I guess sources from Doc Searle's and his own vendor relationship management stuff It's called intent casting who's heard of intent casting Okay, a couple people of course Thomas So the basic idea is what if so right now everything's were kind of based on the seller so the seller Has property and they are they want to sell it they find brokers in the whole kind of industry the MLS And everything else is Based on trying to get out there and find buyers. You know, are you interested in a single family dwelling right here? How about you a list of pamphlets and emails and you know flyers you name it? What if instead? What if we were in tension attention versus intention for those of you on the other side of the mic So what if so that's a good one It's a what if we could start with where the money is the buy this is an example or get them more involved We have some buyers brokers here So in a in a in a system where we dealt at the design phase with identity in a rational scalable way Where people could have unique identities even as they change jobs and change locations and even as platforms change or as you Interoperate with different services One thing you could get potentially is people being able to list their purchase interests to Broadcast their intent my family might be interested in finding a single family dwelling within thus far of a school and this type of Situation so you're discoverable by sellers that could be huge in terms of just that one design component difference within an interoperable set of services and certainly within a platform Could could revolutionize the industry in terms of efficiency You have to have supply and demand find each other half of that equation is the buyers and Engineering for them could be big fiduciaries For data to is a critical thing Thomas will talk more about this, but I've worked for the last three years of credit unions Looking at ways that they as fiduciaries to their members could also offer a type of service Where you put your personal data there as well as your your your money That seems to be supported within a federally chartered Scope of of their regulations they do that to some extent now if there's a place where people could have their data more information about them where they own and control it and could in a In a unauthorized you know tracked legit way make it available to Buyers agents and sellers agents and to others that are looking you know kind of across a sector That could be huge as well. So Responsible use of personal data and well engineered systems are critical and I think at the bottom of all that is a sense of open standards and in a sense of and in solving for identity on day one so I certainly hope the um the The pu ID project, which is kind of what we started with in 2015 when I said Bill I'm behind this thing. You're going to do when the realtors come to town. I hope it finds life I hope it finds purchase so that the it's a property you need an identifier so that That was one thing that we could get right as a result of of all the efforts coming next with the digital Transformation of the real estate industry that alone I genuinely think could a lot for a lot of mileage and for a lot of Beneficial reform and in a more rational market that serves everybody Much better. So with that, you know, I'm happy to to chat a little bit or go right to the next person and Let me just take this podcast off the air