Welcome to all the new people!

[Chris Saad]

We have recently had a big influx of people (for obvious reasons!) so
please introduce yourselves, the projects and companies you are
involved with and how you would like to see DataPortability evolve.

This is, after all, a way of talking about all the existing standards
in context of a complete solution.

Look forward to hearing from you all and making data portability
possible together!

Cheers,

Chris

[smn]

Hey Chris,

We, as in Soocial, are happy to have found dataportability.org through
all this commotion surrounding Robert Scoble's adventures. We're
working on building a solid contact management and synchronization
system that is hassle free and that'll enable you, the user, to take
you contact data anywhere you want it. In short the idea is to have
all your contact data up to date all the time and anywhere you want
them. Right now we're making all contact data available through a
simple API and as hCards published in our HTML code. Right now we're
supporting the synchronization of contact data between phones that
support SyncML, OS X's Addressbook and our web application. On top of
that we're working on synchronizing data with other online services
such as GMail, Highrise and LinkedIn. We've built a Facebook
application but due to their ToS restrictions you can only view your
contact data inside Facebook, not vice versa.

We're very interested in this whole discussion going on, specifically
on the topic of ownership of data. From our perspective the data is
the users' and we're keen for ideas on how we could improve the data
portability aspect of our applications and also how we could
contribute to this initiative.

cheers,

Simon
Soocial.com
http://twitter.com/smn

[ripanti]

Hello Chris,

I'm one of huge number of guys who try to contact you in the last
hours :-).
In a few weeks we start with communipedia. CP could be used in two
ways.

First as a semantic search engine and second as a community hub. We
allow to make alle your community data portable by using open
standards.

As you can see :-)) Germany is not longer sleeping :-))

Regards
Marco

[dominikfaber]

Hey Chris,

this is softgarden from Berlin (Germany) :)

We are developing webbased information systems (web applications) and
social software. In the last time we have gained a lot of expertise
with HR-XML (data format for HR specific data) and we love standards.
Now we are thinking about APML and its integration into feedbuddy.de,
one of our growing social software services for social rss.

Best wishes
Dominik

On 4 Jan., 08:05, Chris Saad <chris.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Christian Scholz (mrtopf.de)]

Hi there!

My name is Christian Scholz (or Tao Takashi in Second Life) and I am
following this group now for about 1 month (I think starting after the
Web2.0 Expo in Berlin where there was lots of talk about portable
social networks, Microformats, OpenID etc.). I am quite interested in
this topic and will also post more about these things on my blog at
http://mrtopf.de/blog (actually I just did). (all of my connections
can be found at http://mrtopf.de/connect).

I am also a Plone developer (an open source CMS, http://plone.org) for
which I am planning to add more social networking features based on
open standards where possible (like Microformats and FOAF is quite
obvious, RSS is integrated already and OpenID is implemented as well).

Looking forward to where the discussion heads now after the "Scoble
incident" :-) 2008 will very likely a very important year for this and
related topics.

Cheers,

Christian

[Zef Hemel]

Hi all,

I'm Zef Hemel. Currently I'm doing a Ph.D. at the Technical University
of Delft (in the Netherlands) in an unrelated area (Model-Driven
Software Engineering).

I am mainly interested in the ability to move your data "in the cloud"
(pictures, documents, calendars) between different services. For this
to happen we started the WebFS initiative, things went wrong with the
company I worked with. Now we're merging the WebFS effort with an
effort developed here at DataPortability.org which is for now called
WRFS. I'll be working with the Josh's and Paul on WRFS and it looks
like it's going to be awesome :-)

I have a blog on which I write on these and other issues
(http://www.zefhemel.com). More info on WRFS can be found here:
http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public/web/web-relational-file-system---wrfs
some old info, vision and links on WebFS can be found here:
http://www.webfilesystem.org

Zef

--
Zef Hemel
E-Mail: z...@zefhemel.com
Phone: (+31) (0)6 156 19 280
Web: http://www.zefhemel.com

[Thomas Huhn (lifestrea.ms)]

Hi everybody,

I'm Thomas Huhn, founder of lifestrea.ms.

We're thinking about the concept of aggregating and re-distributing
your social graph, your content, your comments and your attention data
for quite a while now and have created lifestrea.ms to accomplish the
goal of being your personal hub on the web to make the vision of total
portability come real.

We've already implemented quite a number of the latest technologies
yet, like OpenId, OPML, APML, RSS and Microformats like hCard and XFN.
What's missing is the big social networks to open up and use these
standards to enable portability from their side.

I hope that by supporting this group we all together can put some
pressure on Facebook & Co. to give the people back what belongs to
them: their data and their social graph.

Cheers,
Thomas

Btw: lifestrea.ms is in closed beta right now, but I'd be more than
happy to give away preferred invites to the members of this group.
Just drop me an email at beta [at] lifestrea [dot] ms.

[John Breslin]

Hi everyone -

My name is John Breslin, I'm the initiator of the SIOC project (http://
sioc-project.org), which provides a standard way for representing rich
data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable
form. SIOC, or Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, has
recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety
of commercial and open-source software applications (see
http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/ for details). Sixteen entities
working on the SIOC initiative supported a W3C Member Submission for
the SIOC ontology, which was published in July.

Futhermore, it'd be great if we can get some of you to come to the
WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork, Ireland in
March. More info at http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability

I'm currently a researcher / academic lecturer at DERI, National
University of Ireland, Galway, but I also happen to fall on the other
side of the fence as co-founder of boards.ie, Ireland's largest
message board site (with our first post dating back 10 years now).

I've recently been evangelising the fact that SIOC can be used to
provide a representation of all content items created by a person (via
their user accounts) on various social media sites, and this can be
nicely combined with the FOAF profile of that person who holds the
associated user accounts.

Looking forward to some interesting discussions!

John.
--
http://www.johnbreslin.com/

[search_engine_marketing_elias_kai]

Hi Chris,
I would guess you are Lebanese.

Well, there is a huge need for what I can call Recycling Content and
Recycle marketing and here comes a potential for Data Interoperability
and portability for a better profitability and lickability.

On Jan 4, 2:00 pm, John Breslin <john.bres...@deri.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone -
>
> My name is John Breslin, I'm the initiator of the SIOC project (http://
> sioc-project.org), which provides a standard way for representing rich
> data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable
> form. SIOC, or Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, has
> recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety

> of commercial and open-source software applications (seehttp://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/for details). Sixteen entities

> working on the SIOC initiative supported a W3C Member Submission for
> the SIOC ontology, which was published in July.
>
> Futhermore, it'd be great if we can get some of you to come to the
> WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork, Ireland in

> March. More info athttp://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability

[victorc]

Hi everybody,

Quickly, I work on the OSocial.net project (http://www.osocial.net/
network) to free and open social data. We are working on new features
for security and privacy and we are using Google OpenSocial API.

Victor

ps : and the DataPortability logo is in my About page :)

On 4 jan, 15:42, search_engine_marketing_elias_kai

<elias....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> I would guess you are Lebanese.
>
> Well, there is a huge need for what I can call Recycling Content and
> Recycle marketing and here comes a potential for Data Interoperability
> and portability for a better profitability and lickability.
>
> On Jan 4, 2:00 pm, John Breslin <john.bres...@deri.org> wrote:
>
> > Hi everyone -
>
> > My name is John Breslin, I'm the initiator of the SIOC project (http://
> > sioc-project.org), which provides a standard way for representing rich
> > data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable
> > form. SIOC, or Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, has
> > recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety

> > of commercial and open-source software applications (seehttp://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/fordetails). Sixteen entities

[John Breslin]

BTW here's a picture I drew today showing how people, their user
accounts on various services, and associated content items and
containers can be represented using SIOC and FOAF:

http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/01/04/dataportabilityorg-web-standards-sioc-and-foaf/

John Breslin wrote:
> Hi everyone -
>
> My name is John Breslin, I'm the initiator of the SIOC project (http://

> ...

[David Baker]

Hi everyone,

My name is David Baker, I am a freelance PHP programmer.
Have been following the group for a while and am working on a concept
social wrapper, providing a standard API to various online services.
A lot of my previous work involved creating web spiders and reverse
engineering content out of proprietary data silo's. So I am interested
in applying this experience to the social web.

--
David Baker
http://dtbaker.com.au/

[Chris Saad]

So I thought I might introduce myself a little more as well.

I am one of the Co-founders (along with many other people who came on
board on day 1) and current Chair of the DP Workgroup .

My role is simply to help people much smarter than me find and
document simple ways of solving the complex problem of end-to-end
DataPortability in a way that uses existing/standard technologies. We
aim to invent as little as possible so all suggestions to fill in the
gaps are welcome.

You can see many of my hopes for DP in the thread I started with the
Journalist interview questions:
http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public/browse_thread/thread/7bae3ecdb2d3113a

@John, very interested in discussing how SIOC fits into the DP picture
- I have started a thread for it over here:
http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public/browse_thread/thread/6307f52acd954674

@Victor, thanks for promoting the DP logo on your site. I look forward
to seeing the open-source code you contribute to the GraphSync.com
project as discussed earlier.

@Everyone - look forward to chatting with you as various threads come
up. I hope that we each commit to implementing the Reference Design
when it is finished! http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public/web/reference-design

We have already committed my company to doing so
(www.faradaymedia.com)

Chris

[MScri...@gmail.com]

Hi,

This is Mark Scrimshire. I have a split personality! I blog internally
at AOL on Web 2.0 topics for Hinchcliffe &Co/O'Reilly Media. I have
been advocating for OpenID at AOL since 2006. You can catch some of
my personal blogs at http://ekive.blogspot.com. where I touch on some
of the topics I cover for AOL.

For my "other life" I work in Health Care addressing various aspects
of IT strategy for one of the big BlueCross BlueShield Plans. I am
looking at the big picture in Health Care and am fascinated by the
potential for data portability in the Personal Health Record space. I
want to find any way I can to advocate adoption of the standards,
protocols and formats being discussed here in order to advance the
state of the art in Health Care.

Our Health Records are personal - they are our property - or should
be! There is therefore a natural alignment with Data Portability. I am
looking forward to promoting this approach!

Regards

Mark Scrimshire

[Tom Morris]

Hi all,

Since we are in introduction mode, I thought I'd jump in. I'm Tom, and
I'm a programmer who is proud to be an amateur (away from the
keyboard, I'm a trainee academician). I've been involved in the
'upper-case' Semantic Web community for about a year. I hang out on
#swig and the semantic-web mailing list. I've written a few bits and
pieces, including some GRDDL profiles. I've also been quite involved
in the OPML community and was invited into an advisory position on
OPML. I've had some involvement with microformats and run a site
called GetSemantic.com which is a documentation wiki for SemWeb
technologies.

Rather than talk, I try to publish sample data to demonstrate the
value of GRDDL. For instance, currently I'm moving my book collection
metadata from the closed AllConsuming.net over to
http://tommorris.org/pages/books using rel values to mark whether I've
read a book, and pointing to the WorldCat record.

Currently, I'm in the middle of organising SemanticCamp London
http://barcamp.org/SemanticCampLondon
which will hopefully be a venue to talk about this sort of thing in
detail over two days.

I found out about DP through Ian Forrester who talked about it at
BarCamp London 3.

Yours,

--
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/

[Devin]

Hello All,

I'm Devin C. Holloway and recently I graduated with a BSC in Marketing
and am pursuing opportunities in Asia related to mobile phone,
Internet, and social networking technology. Since online social
networks (in their current form) appeared I've been fascinated with
the technologies and societal impact of online social networking. I
joined this group because I think data portability is an absolutely
essential component of any online social network that will stand the
test of time.

Cheers,

Devin

[Bart Stevens]

Chris (and all),

A superb 2008 first of all.

My name is Bart Stevens and I'm active in the world of Vendor
Relationship Management.

As we try to put the individual/consumers back in the center (vrs the
seller) I think there could be some overlap between the fields.

Therefore my interest.

Cheers,

Bart

[dangrig]

A little bit about myself:

I am Dan Grigorovici, work at AOL/Tacoda, leading data strategy and
analytics. I am a firm believer in VRM, user-side data ownership and
LinkedData (see Kingsley's post). Working incessantly on developing
the next gen user-side, semantic-based machine learning technology. I
am an analytical person by trade, and my focus is applying machine
learning methodologies to linked data as graphs, aka Relational (as in
triples) Data Mining-enabled applications.

[tkoeppen]

Hi Chris,

i'm Thomas Koeppen and currently leading the development of mobile and
music content delivery applications at Jamba.
OpenId was a first trial for us tech-introducers to enable single sign
on in web during last years, but without wide industry usage.
2008 could be the year of aggregation of social networks, we all love/
hate our different networks on facebook, linkedin, twitter, myspace.
Nowadays there exists a poor relation between content publishers,
social networks and identity portability.

Scoble's Facebook/Plaxo adventure gave me a hint to this group.
The portability of identity data (and securing the same) must be the
next step to open interoperability between social networks.
Great idea: DHCP for identity.

Looking forward to listen and/or contributing to the discussion of
identity data ownership and portability.

regards,
Thomas

http://twitter.com/thx

[Mike Pearson]

Hi all,

My name is Mike Pearson. I have 28 years experience in IT, the last 8
of which have been working for the NZ government in the area of e-
government. I get paid to think about solutions that address the
challenges of government, including not only the technology, but also
the people, processes, and information involved, and their
relationships to one another and to the external environment.
Typically government people like myself will bring a different
perspective to the open data discussion, because we also think about
topics such as sovereignty, legitimacy, multi-culturalism, archiving
(10-100 years access to information), accessibility, etc.

The NZ government has had a policy of open data since 1997. I am
interested in how this newest technology might assist in achieving our
goals. Personally I think the industry is continuing to push an
information management paradigm from last century, when new ways of
thinking/opportunity are opening up.

Thanks, Mike


Links:
* Principles for government-held information:
http://www.ssc.govt.nz/Documents/policy_framework_for_Government_.htm
* Different paradigm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM

[Chris Saad]

Welcome everyone - sounds like everyone has a very interesting
perspective to contribute - very exciting indeed!

I am most happy that the people getting involved are from vendors and
organizations that can begin to implement the concepts of
DataPortability in a practical way.

@Mike - I look forward to your government perspective (have you seen
www.participantdemocracy.com btw?)

@Dangrig - Great to see you here - I am also a huge fan of VRM and see
DP as having a large role to play.

Keep the intros coming. I also encourage you to contribute to the
ActionPacks (http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public/web/
actionpacks) they really need some work :)

Cheers,

Chris

[Geoffrey McCaleb]

Hi Everyone,
Thanks to Chris for setting up this public group. It's great to see so
much effort put to such good use.

I am the founder of a social search site called Nsyght.com. We are big
believers in data portability and currently leverage oauth, OpenID,
and microformats as a means to allow users to shuttle their data
around.

I suppose you could equate Data Portability to the old Cathedral vs.
The Bazaar metaphor. Users are going to want to move freely from one
service to another and not be forced to stay in their walled gardens.
At the end of the day, social networks can/should become more
situational. I may want to use LinkedIn for business, Last.fm for
music, Magnolia for bookmarking, Dopplr for travel, and Facebook for
friends or recreation (ahem, and maybe Nsyght for search *grin*). Why
shouldn't my personal data be tied together?

I appreciate to an extent that Facebook and others want a certain
degree of lock-in, but at the end of the day its my data, and I want
to do with it as I please. :)

Looking forward to help out in any way that we can!

cheers,

Geoffrey

[Dan York]

Greetings!  My name is Dan York and I chase bright shiny objects.  

Seriously, I work for the CTO of Voxeo ( http://www.voxeo.com/ ), a company providing a hosted or premise-based platform for VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP applications.  My focus is on evaluating and exploring emerging communication technologies and services (including social networking) and I'm responsible for implementing (and writing on) our corporate blog portal at http://blogs.voxeo.com/  I also participate on Voxeo's behalf in standards meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Additionally I'm on the board of the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) and write in a blog and produce a podcast related to that topic.

Separately from that, I've been blogging in various sites since May 2000 (URLs in my signature) and in one of my blogs, http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/ , write about social networks and have written a number of times on the issue of "walled gardens": http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/walled_gardens/index.html  as well as writing about OpenID in various ways. I also participate weekly in a PR/communications-related podcast, http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz/ , that often addresses some of these issues as well.

I've been online since the mid-1980s and have joined at one time many of the various social networks out there with usually some variation on "danyork" or "dyork".  My interest in this group is in several ways:

1. Every time I go to a new social networking service, I would like to NOT have to go through the pain of recreating my entire network of friends/contacts/whatever.  I would like some way to expand the notion of "identity" to include the "network" of people I associate with.

2. I would like one login / password that I can just use across all sites in a secure manner.  I like many aspects of OpenID, but I'd like to see it more widely accepted as a login credential.

3. I'm a huge supporter/believer in open standards and so would like to see these mechanisms created as open standards accessible to all who want to implement them.

4. As a security guy, I want to be sure there are ways to protect the privacy of my data, i.e. I want some degree of granular control of what I do expose to a given social networking service.  I also want the login and authentication mechanisms to be secure.

And, as this introduction post clearly shows, I very obviously missed the class on "brevity" when it was given and so tend to write longer messages. (Which is one reason I use Twitter ( http://twitter.com/danyork )...  the vain hope that someday I'll just write shorter. :-)

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves,

Dan

--

Dan York  dy...@lodestar2.com

http://www.danyork.com/   skype:danyork

Phone: +1-802-735-1624

Disruptive Telephony - http://www.disruptivetelephony.com

Disruptive Conversations - http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/

Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast - http://www.blueboxpodcast.com/

Voice of VOIPSA - http://www.voipsa.org/blog

Voxeo weblogs - http://blogs.voxeo.com/

Twitter - http://twitter.com/danyork

[Warren Brian Noronha]

Hello

My name is Warren Brian Noronha, I am working for change.org and
another social network. Some of my goals are building interoperatable
social networks.

Warren

[Marcus]

Hello All,

I'm a director of WFMU Free Music Archive project (http://
freemusicarchive.org/) and we're keen on many of the standard
encapsulated by this group.

I'm especially interested in locational gatherings. Is anybody
available to meet up in the New York, NY area?

Marcus

[Alex Hillman]

Hey Everybody!

My name is Alex Hillman, I'm a developer and web standards/microformats ninja as well as one of the founders of Independent's Hall, a coworking space in Philadelphia. I've learned a great deal about the issues surrounding data portability from Chris Messina, who I've worked with previously on a handful of things, and look forward to meeting the rest of you and contributing in any way that I can.

In the last several weeks many of the lunch conversations at IndyHall have centered around data portability, OpenID, Microformat best practice, and lots of ideas for making "future-web", today. I'll be representing our group for the most part but have extended the invitation to a few other folks here to keep an eye on the inner-workings of this list.

Marcus, and anyone else on the east coast, I'd be happy to co-organize east coast meetups to hack through anything we may come across. I think it'd be great to try to have an east coast hack-session any time there is one going on in the Valley, and work in tandem.

Cheers!

-Alex


--
-----
--
-----
Alex Hillman
web.developer
vocal: 484.597.6256
digital: al...@weknowhtml.com | skype: dangerouslyawesome
visual: www.weknowhtml.com | www.dangerouslyawesome.com
local: www.indyhall.org

[AndrewBadera]

Hi all,

Andrew Badera, general geek and hacker, and CTO of Change Round-Up.
Our business model is 100% driven by SOA, and we're very interested in
the future of data exchange and portability among the many entities we
interact with, or hope to interact with.

--Andrew Badera

[jsalv...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I am associated Profesor at the UPM (Technical university of Madrid).

We are working on this themes related to virtual organitations for
collaborative environment and into teleeducation (Personal Learning
Environment). I think we may contribute and integrate some
of the work in the ongoing projects.

We have been working on a filesystem ( Bloomie) quite similar to the
one proposed here, but based on DHT.

We can host meetings and organize some workshops in Madrid.

Joaquín

[jmuffat]

Hi everybody,

I'm Jérôme Muffat-Méridol, founder of webphotomag. My current focus is
on gpuViewer (http://www.gpuViewer.com), a revolutionary interface
designed to help people in managing their photo database. In the pipe
are a number of features related to syncing the database with the
various sites you might be using to show your pictures off, and one
key aspect of putting them online is to let people know...

DataPortability sounds just exactly like what's needed: some way for
our users to easily refer to existing data when looking up people,
groups and such things that you want to be sure are kept confidential
where it applies.

The case of gpuViewer may be of particular interest because it isn't a
web application, but an actual executable that users download and can
be used without necessarily being connected to the internet.

Happy New Year to everybody, and let's make this initiative a
success !
J.