Link to the Data Sharing Workshop and Summit.
There is a lot of energy right now around different ideas on how to share data across social media sites. Based on current discussions on the dataportabiltity.org lists and other places, it is clear that a range of potential standards and approaches are emerging.
The energy feels a lot like it did when Phil, Doc and I called the first Internet Identity Workshop – at that time there was a cluster of people thinking about and working on different technologies around user-centric identity. We had been meeting other conferences, but we had not spent time together to really hear different proposed approaches. They all had similar ideas. We recognized this and realized that if we brought them together, it would lead to the emergence of shared understanding and interesting alignments.
At IIW 1 the first day involved participants presenting their different approaches to user-centric identity. The second day was open space – an organized way to support critical conversations that emerged out from listening to all the presentations the day before. It was on that day that the serious conversation between Brad Fitzpatrick & David Recordon’s OpenID(1), Johannes Earnst’s LID, Drummond Reed’s xri/inames all had a conversation that lead to a commitment to meet up a month later and that conversation became Yadis – a group that was joined by SXIP a few months later and then a few months later this was all folded in and became OpenIDv2.
Another outcome of the Internet Identity Workshop has not matured yet but it is coming along. The card selector metaphor, interfaces and client code to do it are starting to be tested and deployed. The cooperate between Kim Cameron and his Microsoft team with IBM and the Higgins & Bandit open source projects has been fostered at these events. The OSIS (Open Source Identity System) Project and Concordia projects are both doing workshops interoperability testing at the forthcoming RSA conference. OSIS has over 200 test in their Interop. The range of actors (standards efforts, open source projects, commercial projects and companies) collaborating is impressive.
Phil, Doc and I didn’t know that these would be an “outcomes” of the event and certainly did not have it as a “goal.” What we did know was that by getting people together to share their ideas, technology approaches and standards, some good would happen – that is, collaboration, synergy and actual investment in and diffusion of user-centric technologies. We also chose a format with open space that left an open playing field – we were not deciding who got to talk, about what or when. This explicitly neutral unpolitical way of organizing also facilitated the collaborative environment.
My goal for the 2nd Data Sharing Summit is to bring together participants from
1) the large companies with 10s of millions of users like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, AOL, Amazon, eBay etc.
2) Small and Medium sized ‘web 2.0’ sites like LinkedIn, RapLeaf, Eventful, Dopplr, Linquia, Dabble, 30Boxes, Magnolia the whole range of Web 2.0 startups that are focused on services for people that involves peoples data.
3) The Standards Guys (Both adhoc and formal) Those putting forward a range of different approaches being proposed for managing the personal data/social network problem. This includes people from the user-centric identity efforts, semantic web standards and tools,
4) Social/Legal/Policy Implications Those thinking about and addressing the social and legal implications of the emerging technologies.
Bringing this range of people together will be key ingredient to getting this gathering be fruitful – I know because of who they are and the passion they have for the topic it will be. I am not going to define ahead of time “what the fruit looks like”
My hope is that there are some similar approaches that can discover each other “now” rather then a year from now when they are ‘going to market’ and decide to cooperate and merge efforts sooner rather then later (like happened with OpenID).
I asked two colleagues who will be attending what he thought the goals were:
* To establish shared consensus about the meaning of data sharing and portability for Internet users.
* To articulate a roadmap for how this can be achieved (and for determining “when we are there”).
* To understand what parts of this roadmap are technical and which are business/social/political/legal.
* To understand which technologies are available and which are emerging to achieve the roadmap.
* To determine how to move forward on the business/social/political/legal challenges.
* get disparate orgs ot work together
* get consensus on standards – and feedback
* identify missing standards
* get testing and compatibility labs -set up!
* and from an evangelistic POV – get Opt-In include din all systems
I think all of these will move forward in the format of Open Space and the collective participation and discernment at the beginning middle and end of the conference.
You can add goals here.
When I think about this gathering the big questions include:
* how do people link their information together across platforms with different services?
* how are permissions managed?
* what are the policies that apply?
* what standards exist?
* what code / frameworks are available to do this?
* what does it mean when my blog is the center of my network?
* is there a standard way to update presence?
* how do the identity tools (openID, oAuth, card selectors, data linking) apply?
* how do semantic web frameworks apply?
I hope to create a high-level professional community that is very engaged with these issues because they want to empower their users to have a copy of their data, to be aware of how it is used and to be able to use their data in interesting ways.
I also hope that a community will emerge that will work together, compete over different options and in the end solve the challenging set of problems that need to be addressed to get data sharing to work.
open space
Reflections on IIW
Facilitating the Internet Identity Workshop was a wonderful experience. I got to bring help the order emerge out of the chaos by leading Open Space. Many felt that it was
About two weeks ago I started making a map of the history of the community. This was in part because I knew a lot of new people were coming to the workshop and I wanted to be sure they had some context of who we were and where we had come from. I translated this into an interactive wall map that allowed people to ad their own elements to the history.
On the timeline:
• Yellow diamonds are protocols
• Pink Trapazoids events that have happened on a timeline
• Purple papers are Publications white papers
• Purple 1/2 circles are podcasts.
Clusters (ot on the timeline):
- Green Parallelograms are mailing lists
- Blue pages are blogs
There are some good photos of this but I will be taking the results and putting them into Omnigraffle and then PDF too.
Tuesday Morning we got to put together the agenda. It involves everyone who wants to present putting what they want to have a session about on a piece of paper. They speak their session title to the whole room and then post it on the wall.
It wasn’t until about mid day on Tuesday that I actually landed and was able to engage in the conference. The Planetwork folks talked a lot talking about the emerging 1society project.
Dinner both evenings was great. Monday was Italian and Tuesday was Thai.
The Identity Commons crowd moved things forward we have a follow up call next week.
At the very end watching and listening to Paul and Drummond go over the relationship between Higgins two projects and XRI / XDI was a great treat.
We concluded our day listening to Eugene Rant about Wikis at Wiki Wednesday. After dinner Meng told us he had founded the Reputation Gang and we invited him to be a part of the Identity Commons.
The highlight to get the essence of what happened is the closing session recorded. Here Tuesday and Wednesday.
Some high complements were given to the conference.
From Kim Cameron:
With Doc Searls and Phil Windely navigating at the macro-level, the amazing Identity Woman Kaliya orchestrated an â€unconference†that was one of the most effective events I’ve ever attended. It’s clear that creating synergy out of chaos is an art that these three have mastered, and participants floated in and out of sessions that self-organized around an ongoing three-day hallway conversation – the hallway actually being the main conference room and event! So we got to engage in all kinds of one-on-one (and few) conversations, meet new people, work out concerns and above all work on convergence. Many people told me they felt history was being made, and I did too.
Opinity’s Tom Madox reflected on the conference today.
Now, before someone reprimands me for implying that there were corporate or technical bigshots in attendance, let me clarify that one. There were, in fact, luminaries of various sorts participating: A-list bloggers, well-known corporate folks, technical experts working at the forefront of innovation in the field of identity mangement … people like that. However, and this is the point: they were not on stage, performing. They were at the tables and in the rooms, talking, listening, asking and answering questions. In terms of social interaction, the conference hierarchy was flat.
Phil Becker wrote in the DIDW newsletter:
This week I saw a significant “state change” occur in this year and a half “Identity Gang” evolution, and it tells me things are going to start to happen. Some of those involved will be happy this is so, others most likely won’t be. But for those not directly involved (i.e. most of the population) it was, in my opinion, a tremendously significant moment in the evolution of the identity conversation, and one that will have many significant ramifications going forward – though these will likely take another year to become clear to those not paying close attention.
They are working on the issues of what form identity must take
to become ubiquitously deployable, become something that will be adopted
comfortably by users, and how we can ever get there from here.
The first sign that the required significant shifts are occurring is
visible in the titles of the sessions this un-conference produced on
its first day. These titles have all subtly shifted in ways that
indicate there is no longer any question that there is a single,
over-arching story behind the identity conversation, and that the
mission now is to figure out how to converge the many efforts that
are underway. These efforts were each begun with a very different
mission and with a very different use/case and problem set driving
them, and this has previously created division and competition. This
time, however, it was clear that everyone was looking for where they
should get on board, and how to avoid having their goals left out.
Technorati Tags: conference, identity, iiw2006, iiw, workshop, XDI, XRI, YADIS
We "don't really like the format"…then don't use it
So, I am here today at OpenCMS. Boris opens a session that he is leading on GeoMapping. He says flat out…”you know I really don’t like this format where we are at the front of the room and you are out there but we all have ideas to contribute”. It is very frustrating for me to hear this because I advocated that the organizers of this conference including Boris use Open Space as the format as soon as I learned about the conference at the end of November (when it was announced). Both myself and Eugene offered to do the facilitation…a month out they had no sessions outlined and would have to do a tone of work to lay out the program.
Now we all sit in rooms 1/2 here, 1/2 doing e-mail – and there would be SO MUCH good stuff happening if the organizers had chosen the Open Space path. As it is things are so-so. Hopefully next time process can be more open and allow for in the moment.