Comments on: Immediacy in all Things = Social Media Principle #8 http://anwith1n.com/2009/01/immediacy-in-all-things-social-media-principle-8/ Participating. Observing. Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:08:25 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: Nicolas Ward http://anwith1n.com/2009/01/immediacy-in-all-things-social-media-principle-8/comment-page-1/#comment-118 Nicolas Ward Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:57:00 +0000 http://anbui.wordpress.com/?p=208#comment-118 I am generally a fan of any technology that reduces the amount of paper I have to deal with. Harvard's process for class registration is a particularly infuriating example (you can register online, but then you still need physical signatures from advisor and relevant professors, people who are often difficult to find, especially when you are a part-time off-campus student). I believe I've used DocuSign (or someone like them) with my financial advisor, opening an account while he was at my apartment going over documents. That said, no offense to your client, this is an area where we need an open standard. In physical reality, I don't need to pay anyone to obtain or use a pen to sign a legally-binding document. A company could certainly still provide the service of being a trusted implementer of the open standard. To some extent, this already exists in the form of OpenPGP (RFC 4880). GnuPG is the common open source implementation, while PGP Corporation tends to provide more usable front-ends, for a price. The hardest parts about this system to implement in the context of contract signing are probably the public key exchange (we still want the benefits of remote access); I also found, when using it myself, is that not enough people I knew used it. A side advantage of such a system is that the document would also be encrypted in transit; while we generally trust overnight delivery services (especially people like bonded couriers), it's still possible (although difficult) to intercept, open, and read a document in transit. I would assume DocuSign uses encryption for all of their transfers too, but is just the channel encrypted, or can the file be transmitted via other protocols? More ramblings to think about :o). (P.S. For some reason your YouTube embeds don't show up in Google Reader.) I am generally a fan of any technology that reduces the amount of paper I have to deal with. Harvard’s process for class registration is a particularly infuriating example (you can register online, but then you still need physical signatures from advisor and relevant professors, people who are often difficult to find, especially when you are a part-time off-campus student). I believe I’ve used DocuSign (or someone like them) with my financial advisor, opening an account while he was at my apartment going over documents.

That said, no offense to your client, this is an area where we need an open standard. In physical reality, I don’t need to pay anyone to obtain or use a pen to sign a legally-binding document. A company could certainly still provide the service of being a trusted implementer of the open standard. To some extent, this already exists in the form of OpenPGP (RFC 4880). GnuPG is the common open source implementation, while PGP Corporation tends to provide more usable front-ends, for a price. The hardest parts about this system to implement in the context of contract signing are probably the public key exchange (we still want the benefits of remote access); I also found, when using it myself, is that not enough people I knew used it.

A side advantage of such a system is that the document would also be encrypted in transit; while we generally trust overnight delivery services (especially people like bonded couriers), it’s still possible (although difficult) to intercept, open, and read a document in transit. I would assume DocuSign uses encryption for all of their transfers too, but is just the channel encrypted, or can the file be transmitted via other protocols?

More ramblings to think about :o).

(P.S. For some reason your YouTube embeds don’t show up in Google Reader.)

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