Communipedia Blog

[via Julia Bond]

Mission

DataPortability is a group created to promote the ideas that:-

• Individuals own their data even when it’s created on third party services
• They should be able to use that data and control what other uses it’s put to
• Access to creating, reading, editing and deleting that data should be provided by those services using standard protocols.

Philosophy

DataPortability maintains that:-

• You own the data you create regardless of the service it’s created on. That service may also have some ownership.
• You have shared ownership of the secondary data created around yours. The service and the people who created it also have ownership.
• You should be able to decide what you do with that data. And what other people can do with it. That includes the ability to extract and reference the data you own and use it elsewhere.

Approach

DataPortability seeks to foster these ideas:-

• By promoting the philosophy and data portability ethos in the marketplace.
• By promoting the use of existing standards that enable theses ideas and encouraging the standards to develop in ways that facilitate it.
• By engaging with individuals, services and standards bodies with similar views and where their fields of expertise are relevant.
• By identifying new standards that are required but don’t currently exist. 

DataPortability is not

At this time we are not attempting to address the specific needs of portability of corporate employee information, as those require more control/ownership by the
employers, by regulatory agencies (i.e. SEC), etc. We don’t preclude our stuff from being useful to corporations, but that is not the intent. In other words, lets not compete with Liberty Alliance who has a different agenda then we do.

We are not an organization that mandates single solutions — we may promote best practices, emphasize different approaches and standards, but our job is not to
mandate a single solution but instead to make that solutions to these problems evolve in the marketplace.

Dataportability Is

We desire to be “pragmatic idealists” — we will not lose ourselves in perfection over making something work. Too many groups get lost in perfection.

We prefer open source — we don’t want to discourage proprietary implementations, but proprietary-only solutions are not what we want.

We prefer bottom-up solutions — the technologies we like tend to have been successful because they grew bottom up from user needs, rather then top down from corporate desires.

Old page for reference.

At the San Francisco meetup on 2/7/2008, a discussion emerged around what the DataPortability Project “Is” and “Isn’t”.  The consensus was to define a set of bullet points that would help clarify the project mission.  The output of the discussion is posted here to ensure the wider group has a chance to enter the debate.

NOTE: You can also read the full meeting summary for a wider context.

What DataPortability Is: (in no particular order)

• Formalizing the discussion of what a users rights are over their data
• Group is made up of individuals, companies, and organizations
• Output of the DataPortability project is freely available
• Will define “data portability” generally and within context of the project
• Will help to normalize terminology used within the data portability space
• Will help to synchronize efforts across other data portability projects.
• Advocacy for Best Practices in data portabililty space.
• Using existing technologies, stitching them together.
• Going to define a vision for the future.
• Going to define capabilities, not technical solutions
• About research and education

What DataPortability Is Not: (in no particular order)

• An advocacy for a single technology solution
• Developing new technology solution.
• Going to force data into the public that shouldn’t be
• A legal entity providing legal-level precision.
• Currently end-user focused
Technorati tags: dataportability