Data Portability: First Open Meeting

Thursday night, the first face-to-face meeting was held at the RapLeaf offices in California or those involved in the Data Portability Group, including Chris Saad (Faraday Media), Daniela Barbosa (Dow Jones), J. Sullivan (Mozilla), Mike McKenna (Yahoo), Marc Canter, Tod Sampson (MyBlogLog), Steve Williams (Digg), Ben Metcalfe, David Recordon (Six Apart), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), J. Trent Adams (MatchMine) and Jim Meyer (LinkedIn).

Chris Saad opened the meeting with introductions and explaining the new hierarchy of the Google Groups set up for the Data Portability Workgroup(s). The momentum of the group is moving so quickly that there is a need to focus people on more specific interests, leaving the general public group as a general mailing list, and funneling people into action groups, with a steering group, technical group, policy group, evangelism group, and implementation, all of which can be found via the general group's pages.

Those of us who were attending via Ustream had a bit of trouble following the conversation; with the feed at one end of a large oval, we missed some of the conversation (and introductions) but were able to pose some questions and interact with the meeting attendees (like Metcalfe and Adams) who were logged into the chat as well.

J. Trent Adams posted a much better summation of the accomplishments of the meeting than I was able to manage, but there were additional concerns that came up in the chat that were partially addressed at the meeting.

One of the problems that comes along with the incredible amount of press that the group has gotten recently is that everyone who becomes interested has their own idea of what data portability means. Allen Stern addressed the issue with his disagreement of Smarr's interpretation, but there are at least tens, if not hundreds, of different thoughts about what it should be.

At one point, a suggestion was made to have a small subset of the group devoted to making decisions regarding the direction of data portability, which Mary Trigiani of Foldier vehemently disagreed with, citing the previous discussion of data portability at FooCamp as being “too exclusive” and leaving people feeling “disenfranchised.”

Anyone who has been involved in Open Source software development knows that you have to have a steering group, and there has to be some hierarchy. You can't get a ship moving in any direction with 50 oars in the water each rowing in their own direction. I understand that in order to have buy-in from so many different groups, no one wants to alienate anyone, but the reference made at the meeting (and I'm sorry I forgot who made it) to OpenID was a valid one. They developed the technology, then took it out to various companies and asked for buy-in. In order to “strike while the iron is hot,” the luxury of having 100 people all defining things differently and addressing different concerns before there is even a rudimentary roadmap makes the scope of the project much larger than it has to be, and slows down progress.

In all probability, some of the people currently expressing interest will drop off, and hopefully leave a core group willing to take charge and determine the most important issues, leaving the noise behind.