Occupancy Permits and the InDoor Facilities Professional Licenses
The occupancy permit
Before they can be occupied, all InDoor facilities must carry a valid occupancy permit. The occupancy permit must be signed by an InDoor Facilities Architect, an InDoor Faclities Contractor, and an InDoor Facilities Inspector (code auditor).
If you are involved in these professions and desire to practice in any of the communities that accept the City of Osmio as administrative capital, you will need to obtain a professional license from this office.
Background
The InDoors Infrastructure specifications start with a fair amount of detail on architecture, construction, building inspection, and property management. In the Professional Licensing Component we turn our attention to architects, contractors, building inspectors, and property managers, that is, the people involved in ensuring that real estate is habitable. Who exactly is going to do all this work? What financial incentive will draw them to one of these new professions?
If you think about it, the function of an increasing amount of software is to do what used to be done in physical buildings. After all, what is a synchronous collaboration tool but a meeting room? What is a file sharing tool (Dropbox, Box, SpiderOak) but a shared filing cabinet?
The big difference between physical and online real estate – other than the latter's elimination of rent expense, traffic jams, dress codes, etc. – is embodied in the occupancy permit. That document is what allows you, the occupant, to be able to trust a physical building. The occupancy permit declares the building to be habitable, and in almost all parts of the world it can be trusted.
Why can it be trusted, you ask? It can be trusted because those who signed for its issuance have put their professional license – that is, their livelihood – on the line with their signature. If the building turns out to have serious flaws then the architect, contractor, and building inspector can all lose their license to practice their profession.
It's been over ten years since the famous MIT Technology Review cover story declared that “The Internet Is Broken” – and headlines show that it's more broken today than ever.
Or, actually, it's not the Internet that is broken at all. The Internet – the Information Highway – does its job well. What's broken is the way we use that marvelous outdoor public transport system. We're holding our meetings, keeping our files, and letting our kids hang out by the side of a busy roadway.
Why do we not use buildings for that purpose?
We don't do indoor things inside online buildings because online buildings do not exist. There is no such thing as a habitable, trustable online building.
The InDoors Infrastructure is here to fix that. The key to the InDoors Infrastructure is the occupancy permit; and the key to the occupancy permit is the professional license.
The first part of this chapter is for those involved with the architecture, construction, building inspection, and property management professions as they apply to non-physical real estate. But not all professional licenses have to do with real estate; additional professional licenses will also be presented.
The reader might ask why the Professional Licensing Component is not a part of the Authenticity Infrastructure – the “people” infrastructure – instead of the InDoors Infrastructure. Good question. Perhaps if we had it to do over again it would be.
Who is a candidate for a professional license, and why would they want it?
The answer is illustrated in this image and text from http://squarebyte.org
InfoWorld asked the question about open source economics in 2009, and, as with the broken Internet issue, it has not been answered. And so the site continues to ask:
It’s a difficult issue. Open source software provides obvious benefits to those who use it, but what does it offer the independent developer or other member of an open source community?
We’ve hinted at the answer, which, like so much else in the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure, is quite old. It’s both familiar and obvious.
But this new solution requires some stepping back and seeing things in a new context.
So let’s step back.
As software professionals, we're building either routing and switching and traffic management facilities, or we're building facilities that will be used by specific groups of people for their specific purposes inside bounded spaces. Indeed, isn't the value provided by much of today's software similar to the value provided by an office building or other InDoor space? Aren't we building sets of bounded and designated spaces in which people can work on and share files with ease and confidence?
Q: What do we build after the highway is built?
A: We build that which highways bring us to, that is, buildings.
If you're working on the highway system known as the Internet, then thanks for providing the rest of us with a really great outdoor public transport system. Please skip ahead to the chapter about the Public Roadways Component.
If on the other hand you're developing that which highways bring people to, that is, buildings, then we have a revenue model for you.
How do real estate professionals ensure that they get paid for their services? After all, real estate professionals don’t “resort to the same lock-in tactics that the proprietary software world has used.”
Rather, real estate professionals use different lock-in methods to ensure that they get paid for their expertise and their hard work.
The proprietary software world uses FUDILI-style lock-in tactics to ensure that they get paid: Fear, Uncertaintly, Doubt, Inauthenticity, Lock-In. Real estate professionals, on the other hand, use different lock-in. Architects, engineers, and construction professionals use the openness and authenticity of the occupancy permit.
The owner of a new building must ensure that the structure passes a set of inspections before it can be granted an occupancy permit, and the architect and contractors must also sign off on it. As a designer and builder of online real estate, doesn't that have a certain appeal to you? The paper used for plans of physical buildings is virtually as free as the open source bits used in online buildings. But if you actually want to use that which is built with the plans, you must pay the maker of the plans and the contractor who built from them.
It’s not just a standard. It's the law.
How do we build the open source business model using the principles of physical real estate?
When you walk into a building, you have a level of assurance that it will not fall down on you. You have confidence in its construction materials. But good materials alone do not make a good building.
What has this got to do with you, the open source software developer? If you're looking for a way to get better rewarded from your open source efforts, the answer will interest you.
Professional Licenses Provide Non-Manipulative Income Leverage
There is of course at least one big difference between asserting a professional license in the physical world and asserting an equivalent license in the online world: there are no face-to-face meetings with the professional who signs the paperwork. And online “paperwork” is not on tangible paper but rather on bits. So a professional license must be bound to a measurably reliable identity, as represented in an X.509 identity credential.
In the “People” part of QEI - the Authenticity Infrastructure - we learned what is involved in establishing a measurably reliable identity; about how the six components of the Authenticity Infrastructure, applied together, result in identity credentials of measurable reliability. We learned about the first professional licensed, the Attestation Officer, who performs Digital Birth Certificate enrollments, which result in identity credentials with an Enrollment Quality score of seven or higher.
That higher-quality enrollment procedure will be one of eight components of an identity credential that will be bound to the next types of professional license, the Architect’s, Contractor’s, Structural Engineer’s, and Building Inspector’s Professional Licenses. In addition to the Enrollment Quality score of seven or higher, the total Identity Quality score of a candidate for the professional licenses of buildings professionals must be 42 or higher.
A good Identity Quality score is just the starting point. Even more important are demonstration of competence and evidence of personal integrity.
To learn more about the benefits of a professional license and about what’s involved in getting one, go to the Professional Licensing Office ata osmio.ch.
OK but…
Having secure InDoor buildings is a good idea, but who is going to occupy them? And more importantly, who is going to pay for them? Who is going to put themselves under the jurisdiction of the City of Osmio?
Can doing things the right way trump FUDILI? Can the audience education process be done right? The answer is the same as the answer to the question, “Can Apache beat Microsoft in the Web server business?” Apache did it right, and it soundly trounced Microsoft in the Web server business.
We can do the same with QEI and its InDoor approach to facilities.
For starters, we are dealing with a need that is intensely felt by the real decision makers in organizations, that is, the CEOs. CEOs need to be in control of everything that affects the success of their organization, and that includes information technology. CEOs are well aware that promises made to their CTOs and CIOs about information technology in general and security solutions in particular have not been met. The cloud revolution provides CEOs with a real catalyst for taking ownership of the one part of the enterprise that has been kept out of their control.
You, the open source software professional, can help the CEO get there by showing that online facilities can be as understandable and manageable as physical facilities. Together we can show that the starting point for this revolutionary change is with identity. Not identity management but identity. The CEO must be able to know who is touching the lifeblood of the company, that is, its intellectual property, its plans, its customer files, and its order flow.
It’s not as though we must educate them on the problems of working outdoors. They know all about malware, botnets, intrusions, and online theft and fraud.
Measurably reliable identities accessing resources kept in InDoor spaces will provide CEOs with what they need to know about who has access to what.
Your Competition Opens the Door for You
Existing “solutions” from IT vendors, on the other hand, do not provide what the CEO needs. Let’s look at one such solution, “application whitelisting,” to show the inherent advantage you’ll bring.
In whitelisting, a list of “good” sources and executables is made available to clients so that only “good” software is allowed to run on their machines. The “whitelisting” “solution” illustrates the problem that you and I can solve with sources and executables that are digitally signed by individual licensed professional code auditors, aka professionally licensed building inspectors.
Getting Paid for Your Hard Work
If you are involved with the development of open source software or other software, then the future needs you. The building professions used to have their equivalent of proprietary code. The square-and-compass symbolism of the Masonic orders allegedly dates back thousands of years to the days when the mystical arts of geometry and trigonometry enabled their practitioners to design and build bigger and better buildings.
Mathematics, like the ability to write source code, is now commonly accessible. Knowledge of the Pythagorean Theorem no longer gets you a fancy fee or a seat at Pharaoh’s table.
But certified knowledge of the application of building design principles does indeed get you rewarded. The legacy of the ancient masons is more than a bunch of pointy tourist attractions in Egypt. That legacy is the guilds and professions that set the methods, standards, and procedures for the design and construction of buildings everywhere. Municipalities around the world rely upon the international communities of architects, structural and civil engineers, and construction and property maintenance professionals for their building codes. The tens of thousands of architectural, engineering, contracting, and property management firms around the world act in many ways like commercial offshoots of very close-knit guilds and associations.
If you are in the practice of making useful things happen with software, either by coding or by installing, configuring, applying, or maintaining software, visit your new Guild of Online Architects, Contractors, and Property Management Professionals at squarebyte.org
