Beta Release of HATs, Rumpel and MarketSquare

We are pleased to release HATs with Rumpel™ and MarketSquare™ today for testing by the beta community.

https://rumpel.hubofallthings.com
https://marketsquare.hubofallthings.com

If you have purchased an instant beta HAT, or signed up as a HAT beta user, you should have received an invitation code to sign up here

https://marketsquare.hubofallthings.com/signup

(click here to know why do you need an invitation code)

If you want an instant beta HAT (within 24 hours), sign up here. If you have already signed up to be a HAT earlybird user, you would expect your HAT in November, a before wider release.

What you need to know about this beta release.

1. Beta is buggy. We are rectifying bugs all the time and you will help a lot by reporting bugs. Some of the views don’t look as nice as they should, and there are still places we need to clean up. Please be patient! We don’t have a full time team so we are working as hard as we can. We would also welcome feedback, both positive and negative – basically anything that you think could help us improve. Please give your feedback in the HAT Users section of the forum – this category is for individuals who own and use HAT. For product specific discussions, please use the dedicated subcategories of the forum – Rumpel Users and MarketSquare Users. If you’d like to report any bugs on Rumpel™, you can report them here; or should you have any bugs to report about MarketSquare™, please post here.

2. Platform preparation. Aside from MarketSquare™and Rumpel™, we haven’t built many HAT-specific services yet (well, except for data shopper on MarketSquare™ and a cool mashup on Rumpel™). This is because we’ve created MarketSquare™ as the social and public exchange platform for personal data on which other services can sit, and have set up the platform infrastructure to make this possible. Similarly, Rumpel™ is the personal and private space of users and again, we’ve set up the platform infrastructure so that other personal add-on services can sit on it in a way that is private to the user. The navigation of going from private (Rumpel™) to public (MarketSquare™) online spaces and making sure that, as users, you know the difference between the spaces, is important so we’ve had to set all that up. By setting all this up properly, we can now open up for companies and ourselves to build services on HAT whether these are free or commercial services in public or private spaces.

3. Data plugs. There are only 4 data plugs currently. We believe HAT data is co-created: while companies have been able to use our co-created data for a while, we, as individuals, haven’t been able to. So we intend to help HAT users bring in more and more data for their personal use, it but if you are a company and you think it’s a good idea to give users back their data (while you still get to keep it for your purposes) leave us some feedback in the Developers section, or better yet, create a data Plug!

4. HAT Technology. The backend technology of the HAT is unique. There may be many concepts of data stores out there but the implementation is an important factor. For data to be legally ‘owned’ by a HAT user, it needs to be technically ‘contained’ as well so that data at rest is not mixed with other data (see the briefing paper on our implementation). We have set up the social, technical and legal aspects of the HAT so that the user’s personal data in the HAT is legally and technically able to be owned by the user and that the HAT user perceives this to be the case as well. As you legally own your HAT, you can legally go and ask companies for your data (for the UK, this is possible under the Data Protection Act 1998 and subject to access requests, see https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/personal-information/). From a technical perspective, giving every individual a cloud microservice container and a personal HAT address, and then scaling it up in this way has never been done before: so testing this in a beta environment is important.

5. Economic & Revenue Model. The economic model of the HAT ecosystem is also important. We are very clear that we must align our economic incentives with that of HAT users so that the more they benefit, the more we do. Since individuals benefit in ways that are also non financial (eg sharing things), we must ensure that free sharing of data is always possible. However, someone has to pay for all the services and infrastructure. So we have to devise revenue models where some money can come into the system to pay for everything and everyone benefits from it. See our blogpost on how HATDeX derive revenues here.

We hope you will be patient with us when the inevitable glitches occur and please don’t give up on us! We are working hard to make this ecosystem a reality.

What you can do to help during the beta testing stage:

• Make data offers and accept data offers so that you can test it and know how it works. During beta testing stage, all money is ‘monopoly money’ so please test the system by making data offers, accepting them etc. etc.

• Keep giving us feedback on how you’d like us to improve, and on any opportunities out there etc. etc. Bear in mind we are only a small team so we’ll need time to get round to everything.

• Keep sharing about the HAT! Share your personal HAT page if you’ve made is semi-public, share MarketSquare™ offers, get the publicity up and direct anyone interested to signing up for a HAT (we are releasing a further 500 instant beta HATs today)

• Keep pulling in your data every time there is a data plug. With more users, more services will come.We need more of us controlling our own data and as the HAT community expands, people will look at us and say wow, that’s a big community, and more apps will be created for us.

• Stay in touch through the forum, Facebook HAT foundation page and on MarketSquare chats!

We hope you will have fun playing with your HAT!

For development community

Please find technical release notes here

Team HATDeX

(The above information as well as beta release notes are available at [http://forum.hatcommunity.org/t/beta-release-of-hat-rumpel-and-marketsquare/]. Please leave feedback there. This link will lead you to the HAT Community Forum, where various discussions within the HAT community take place among users, developers, and service providers in the HAT ecosystem. To start using the forum, please read http://forum.hatcommunity.org/t/about-this-forum/.