Thursday evening following Internet Identity Workshop #18 in May I co-Founded and became Co-CEO of the Leola Group with my partner William Dyson.
So how did this all happen? Through a series of interesting coincidences in the 10 days (yes just 10 days) William got XDI to work for building working consumer facing applications. He showed the music meta-data application on Thursday evening and wowed many with the working name Nymble registry. The XDI [eXtneible Resource Identifier Data Interchange] standard has been under development at OASIS for over 10 years. Getting it to actually work and having the opportunity to begin to build applications that really put people at the center of their own data lives is a big step forward both for the Leola Group and the Personal Data community at large.
William and I met in September of 2013 via an e-mail introduction from Drummond Reed. We started working together the day I met him on the efemurl project. We were dating a few days later and a few weeks later we were engaged. We announced this during the closing circle at IIW #17.
The efemurl project was taking a extensively featured web platform William had built over several years and working to turn it further develop it and turn it into a consumer-co-operative. The short hand way to describe, you know in that way they describe movie plots, it’s like Google and REI have a baby. The core ideas developed for the efemurl platform will be brought over into the applications the Leola Group is developing. Core aspects of what the Leola Group is are to valuable to be owned by one company and we will be working with Planetwork to turn the operation of those into a consumer co-operative.
So big questions for people in the community include:
Are you still involved with IIW?
Yes of course! IIW will continue and my roll with it will too. Phil Windley founded his company Kynetx and continues to be a co-leader of IIW with me and Doc. We have a great production team lead by Heidi Nobantu Saul.
What is going to happen to PDEC?
We have worked to create a 6 month transition plan for the organization/community to new leadership. We have brought on Dean Landsman (well known for his leadership in the VRM community) serve as Communications Director and among other things host regular community calls and host a podcast. As part of taking on the Co-CEO role in the new company I have woven into the job taking the time needed to properly transition out of my role as Executive Director and work with the community over the next 6 months to get governance in line and then have that leadership group hire an new Executive Director. You can read more about it on the PDEC blog and see a video we made.
The organization just welcomed 11 new members. Dean will be presenting about his new role with PDEC at the Personal Data Meetup in NYC on Monday.
When are you getting Married?
William and I are getting married the weekend after IIW #20 which is April 7-9 (Yes, it’s way early!!!). This will help friends coming for IIW from around the world being able to join in the celebration.
Congrats Kaliya! Very happy to hear both the personal and professional news.