First DataPortability monthly report released
The surprisingly active DataPortability has released their first monthly report.
DataPortability is an open, user-driven and user-centric workgroup addressing the growing concern about data portability, security and ownership. They procliam: “As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors.”
The gist of that is: Your Facebook friends list should belong to you, not Facebook; you should be able to take that data to BeBo or OpenSocial; you should be able to prohibit Facebook from keeping it or using it for marketing purposes if and when you choose; it should be easy to do and universal.
It plans on inventing absolutely nothing to do this. Rather, it will utilize existing formats like apml, opml, rss, OpenID, and the like.
While the goals of the project overall are laudable and I strongly support the work, I’m particularly taken aback by the group’s structure and workflow. Organizationally, it is probably the most impressive decentralized emergent project I have ever ever seen.
Highlights from the first report include:
- Support from Major Vendors - including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Six Apart, Plaxo, Flickr and Twitter.
- Impressive and inspiring use of Google Groups to manage the project and coordinate work among dispersed and dissociated contributors
- Use of semi-independent, self-organizing action groups - they include the Steering Action Group, Technical Action Group, Policy Action Group, Evangelism Action Group, and the Implementation Action Group. All are welcome to contribute.
- Road maps and deliverables being set
Keep an eye on these folks, they will likely change the way you exist on the web for the better. And quite possibly, the way we organize ourselves and our work.
The DataPortability Report: January 2008
DataPortability Google Group
Share Your Thoughts Below
You can follow any responses to this entry via its RSS comments feed. You may also leave a trackback by clicking this link.