The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced last night that it has elected its first group of Steering Group officers. The Working Group strives to help user data become freed for secure re-use across different websites and services. The first chair of the Steering Group will be Daniela Barbosa, who is a Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a Dow Jones company.
Can the Data Portability Working Group overcome some early shakiness caused by the perception that it's all hype and no substance? The group got big press when Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other companies publicly joined up - but critics allege that press is all that's been accomplished.
The Working Group is really important. The work of the entire group, not just the most visible member and founder Chris Saad, has put the issue of data portability on a much larger public stage than it might have been on otherwise.
That said, it's unclear how much additional work has been getting done there.
The Open Web Foundation launched separately to be a place for developers to crunch code together in the same spirit as the Working Group.
Many have questioned what the big players have done since joining the group. Saad and Barbosa point to data portability initiatives like Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Availability as examples - but it's unclear how much that has to do with the Working Group. Barbosa says that members of Microsoft, MySpace and Digg have been particularly engaged in the day to day discussions about the forthcoming Best Practices documents the group is focused on.
Chris Saad has been criticized as a petty dictator who struggles to work with the existing community and who puts the credibility of the issues at risk by building so much hype. Saad says that building buzz is one of the most important things the Working Group can do and that it's complimentary to coders coding.
The election of Barbosa as Steering Group chair could help the group move past some of those criticisms and help public awareness extend to the many other members of the Working Group. An employee of a giant company, Barbosa is unlikely to face the same criticisms of pushing an obscure technology in her own interests as Saad has with APML (Attention Profile Markup Language.) She will likely face some criticism as a "big co" player who could push the data portability agenda away from the interests of users and little companies - but that's mitigated by the fact that she does relatively obscure, geeky work at Dow Jones and is widely liked as a person. (Disclosure, Barbosa's book The Taxonomy Cookbook is advertised here on RWW.)
Photo of Daniela Barbosa by, once again, Brian Solis.
In addition to the election of Barbosa, the whip-smart Elias Bizannes has become Vice-chair, a number of Action Groups have been formed and various people are heading those.
Bizannes is leading the Mission/Vision task force, Saad is heading the Communication task force, Steve Greenberg, the CEO of pre-launched white label social networking service Ciabe is leading the Governance task force regarding how the group will work, tech entrepreneur Brady Brim-DeFores is leading the much-needed Branding/Logo task force and Barbosa is leading the DataPortability Grid Tool Task Force tracking tangible company support.
The prize inside this complicated box may be the promised documents on best practices. While the Open Web Foundation is working on code standards, the Data Portability Working Group could help articulate best business and communications practices for companies wanting to support data portability. There's a lot of interest, but concerns like privacy, monetization and confusion are slowing adoption of data portability measures. The Working Group is well positioned to tackle these issues.
We look forward to seeing those documents. It may take awhile - everyone's got day jobs to do and this is all volunteer work being done for the well being of the web and humanity. We're encouraged by what the group is doing on a daily basis, as well, on the Google discussion group for example.
We wish the group's new officers the best of luck in advancing an agenda that will help empower users and developers to build a better internet for all of us.
Comments
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In the time it took DP to get new logo, they could have formed a W3C WG & started a spec. Does W3C do anything relevant anymore?
Posted by: Brian Daniel Eisenberg
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August 13, 2008 11:05 AM
Does DP do anything relevant?
Posted by: Jason Carreira
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August 13, 2008 11:08 AM
Well, can i complain about something: you've written a long article about Data portability and no direct like to their website. what does that mean?
Posted by: erinther | August 13, 2008 11:11 AM
Thanks, formatting error - fixed now.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 13, 2008 11:18 AM
Thanks for mentioning the Open Web Foundation especially as I think it can be complementary to the policy work the Data Portability Working Group is wanting to do. I just want to stress that the Open Web Foundation is *not* developing code, rather open specifications for the web that developers can then easily implement.
Posted by: David Recordon
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August 13, 2008 12:00 PM
In case your readers want more detail on what we're up to, here's a link to the update I sent out following the Steering Group call where we ratified the officers.
Included are links to the specific projects you mention and how people can get involved.
http://www.mediaslate.org/wp/2008/08/12/dataportability-project-update/
Posted by: J. Trent Adams | August 13, 2008 12:17 PM
I too was wooed by Mr Saad's promise of portable data
But after that fiasco of a logo contest ( They wanted a proprietary logo for an organization that's supposed to promote the adoption of EXISTING open standards. WTF? ) , I abandon the "organization". The fact that Mr. Saad went over to the Dark Side and bowed down at the feet of those two Sith Lords in Redmond just validated my decision.
You should consider the Data "Portability" Group to now be an email harvester to force SilverLight down people's throats at some future point in time, after Microsoft buys Faraday Media.
I am now tentatively drinking the kool aid provided by Mr Recordon's new group, and it is especially encouraging to see it has the blessing of Chris Messina and Diso.
Posted by: Todd | August 13, 2008 12:45 PM
People love to set up organizations, create newsletters and pontificate. I love the stroke my brain thinking about theory as much as you do.
Time for action - go install Tahoe - http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html, have a few beverages sitting out in the sun away from the keyboard and think about the possibilities.
I've been talking about distributed secure databases as a datastore for years. Not that I'm an expert but here we have Tahoe that does most of what we want, so let's start building services on top of it.
Perhaps we could avoid creating more Twitter-based services and instead build on top of Tahoe, or whatever else you're all going to decide on.
Task forces, mission/vision groups, whatever happened to the spirit of hacking and gtd? Enough already with the bureaucracy I have to post this same sentiment every few months, maybe someday it will sink in.
Maybe all it will take a VC fund to get people moving faster?
Posted by: David Evans | August 13, 2008 1:11 PM
If only all petty dictators encouraged the formation of an open governance model, an elected steering group and an official chairperson etc - putting themselves out of a job.
We'd have to invade less countries :)
Posted by: Chris Saad | August 13, 2008 1:21 PM
Marshall thank you for covering the new official status of the project and the kind words. It is a big responsibility that i have taken on and i have been very encouraged by the responses from the entire community- so thank you all.
We certainly have a lot of work in front of us, but those that are engaged have not been shy about the amount of hours that they have dedicated to the project. I have worked on many teams before that are trying to address diverse projects- and i have never seen a more committed group of individuals- i am confident that we will deliver and over the next few months we will 'woo' back some of those early data portability supporters.
We have had some hurdles to jump over the last few months (hey we have only been 'around' 8months and are a unique type of open participation group) but the structure that we have established has already proven to be the right one to move the things that the marketplace got excited about in those first fews months!
we welcome all voices and encourage
Posted by: daniela barbosa
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August 13, 2008 3:25 PM
I stopped reading Open Web Foundation (OWF) threads after the first few days due to the deluge (and diversity) of responses to its charter. Last I checked, I thought OWF was focusing on standardized IPR agreements for new upcoming potential open standards / specs, has this changed recently?
Posted by: Bob Ngu | August 13, 2008 3:51 PM
Thanks for the kind words Marshall :)
As for Saad being a dictator, I had to laugh! A lot of the criticism is more a case of it being the nature of a community with no formal governance process - all open communities need a benelovent dictator. Saad was simply a focussed target - both for praise and for criticism.
Lots of questions, plenty of answers. Looking back in hindsight, there's an interesting history behind us to explain what may appear inaction, but I'll save that for another time. :)
Posted by: Elias Bizannes | August 13, 2008 5:43 PM
Marshall - thank you for your excellent coverage of the DataPortability Project's progress in formalization of our governance model.
With these structural questions put to bed, we are all getting back to what we set out to do in the first place: evangelize, facilitate, and evolve the conversation around data portability.
Feel free to join in anytime â you're always welcome.
Warmly,
Brady
Posted by: Brady Brim-DeForest
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August 13, 2008 6:50 PM
Standards efforts are not the place to "evangelize, facilitate, and evolve the conversation"... That all smacks of an immature field that's not ready for a standard. If you're not ready to pull a common set of functionality from a group of already working products, then you're just asking for a counterproductive academic solution that totally misses anything useful in the real world. That was always my impression of the direction of DP, and I'm disappointed to see that it seems to still be going that way.
Posted by: Jason Carreira
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August 13, 2008 7:31 PM
Nice job, Marshall. Objective in all the right places.
I know from volunteering with all the folks named that they really want to keep the project useful to all constituents of data portability. That would be insiders and outsiders to technology. The thing for all of us to remember, and I can say this since I've retired from active duty on the project: these people are all volunteers and many are with startups, so they work on the project in their spare time. When you think of the transparency they have cast into the world of open data, in less than a year, in their spare time, without formal governance, without paid employees, I think we'd all agree that the contribution is already significant.
Looking forward to what they deliver in the future. Meanwhile, thanks for splaining everything, Lucy.
Mary Trigiani
Posted by: Mary Trigiani | August 13, 2008 9:44 PM
Come on guys, give some credit instead of trashing all the time. DP has done a great job doing what it set out to do, evangelize and raise the profile of making personal data portable. How can you seriously criticize them for all the effort their undertaking for a great cause?
Get off your high horse, understand the DP working group for what it is and give them the encouragement they deserve.
Posted by: Jason Preston | August 13, 2008 10:08 PM