My Data Portability Usage Example

[Christian Scholz (mrtopf.de)]

Hi!

In my podcast I talked about a possible usage scenario but I also
wanted to post it here as we talked quite a bit on Skype today about
many aspects I covered in there. But here it is.

Let's assume that I am already a member of different social networks
for different purposes like making new friends, making new business
contacts, being in virtual worlds and so on. Now I want to join yet
another social network. Here is a possible process:

1. I click the Sign Up button and get asked for my email address which
is used as my identifier.

2. The email address is converted into a URL and an identification
scheme

3. The new site sends me to identify myself to e.g. my openid provider

4. I come back and need to select a profile I want to use (might also
happen on the openid side of things). These are retrieved from either
all the sites I have profiles on or from a list of predefined
profiles. It might contain my Second Life profile which is completely
separate from my business profile and so on. I choose one to use.

5. Next up I choose which fields of this profile should be publically
visible for people who are not my contacts.

6. Now all my relationships on the various sites I am a member are
retrieved and presented to me. I can choose which one I want to make a
contact on this site, too. Of course only those are listed who are
member of the site already. I can invite others though via the normal
mechanisms we have today. To make a selection easier (I might have 500
contacts) a tagging system is in place in which I can choose to e.g.
auto-select those contacts tagged with "business" or "secondlife".
These tags or groups are user-defined. I can also choose to subscribe
to certain tags so that whenever I add a new contact with such a tag
on any other site this new site will also have it listed
automatically.

I select all of them and continue.

7. Now I am ready to go for normal usage.

Of course later on I might want to define certain things:

- who of my contacts has access to which fields of my profile.
- who of my contacts has access to which of my assets on the site
(e.g. like flickr's family and friends settings).

These permissions for assets might again be synchronizable among sites
by e.g. tag. Just add the permission for the tag.

So this is an example scenario. For me important is the grouping
because it will get a lot of work if I have to assign certain
permissions over and over again esp. later on when new contacts are
made. It would be nice to automatically have them be a contact on
various other sites (so I get only listed for them on the new site if
I allowed the tag they belong to to add me).

Now I also learned today that this scenario is not the main goal of
the Data Portability group, at least not the Blueprint Group. So I
thought I post it here as it's maybe also more in the realm of what
processes can be implemented or are suggested. Of course technology is
needed to make this happen because if everybody implements it in a
different way, not much is won.

So this is my idea, what are your ideas or what are your thoughts
about this?

cheers,

Christian

PS: The podcast is available at
http://mrtopf.de/blog/plone/topfcast-english-episode-01-about-data-portability-the-snow-sprint-and-the-plone-development-process/

PPS: I do not know which topic to post where actually as there are so
many groups ;-) I hope it's correct to post it here.