Mean what you say, say what you mean

The Google Health Announcement has a few yellow (just before red) flags for me. Marissa Mayer is using language that sounds open, but it isn’t. This is the most recent example of this sort of language manipulation and it needs to be clarified.

From the announcement about Google Health:

Under a heading named ‘Portability’, Marissa writes:

“Our Internet presence ultimately means that through Google Health, you will be able to have access and control over your health data from anywhere. Through the Cleveland Clinic pilot, we have already found great use-cases in which, for example, people spend 6 months of the year in Ohio, and 6 months of the year in Florida or Arizona, and will now be able to move their health data between their various health providers seamlessly and with total control. Previously, this would have required carrying paper records back and forth.”

It seems to me that Marissa is using the word ‘Portability’ to invoke the concept of Data Portability.

Data Portability is not about access to your data from any Internet connected device. Rather, Data Portability is about using established best practices so that users can bring their data with them and, more importantly, share or export that data back out.

Her post does not explicitly deal with the question of best-practice data interchange between various health record systems – only that their platform strategy will allow you to connect to (some?) services and tools. Will these connections be proprietary and lock us into a Google Health enabled record keeping system? Or will they be based on common Data Portability best practices?

The Audacity of Hope

In the past few months I have been reminded by many that hoping for a thing does not make it true. Watching the US Presidential Election I have heard the same theme emerge as Hilliary Clinton attempts to question Barack Obama’s ability to convert lofty and eloquent speeches into real change. I even posted a Seesmic video about it recently.

The question I have, though, is if hope does not make something happen, then what does?

Doesn’t all action involve hope? Is not hope a key ingredient for change?

Before one can achieve a thing, they must first imagine it. Before they act on their imagining they must first dare to hope that they could actually have some impact on the outcome.

Even decisions made based on fear involve a hope to avoid that which we fear.

Hope is a powerful driving force. It enables us to act. Without hope, we are often paralyzed.

Most people I talk to who ‘wish’ they could do something better, or more ambitious, have a common refrain. They dare not hope that their more lofty goals are attainable. They therefore do not act.

Imagine if you could gather a large enough group of people to hope for the same outcome. If you had the right mix of participants and the right critical mass, is there anything that hope, followed by action, can not achieve?

Criticizing hope is actually a thinly veiled claim of naivety or unjustified idealism. If one’s hopes are too big, too ambitious or too lofty, then surely they must be too naive to understand the complexity of the issue and the magnitude of the challenge ahead.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe those who start with hope and push for change have not yet been sufficiently jaded by a broken system or violent resistance to their ideas.

Maybe, though, if those idealistic and naive people (if in fact they are those things) can somehow encourage others to hope, and then still others; maybe, just maybe, hope will turn into action, and action will turn into real change.

To paraphrase the West Wing… “Do you think a small group of dedicated people can change the world” “Of course, it’s the only thing that ever has”.

Hope is not empty. It can never be false. Hope, well expressed and shared, is the beginning of something new.

Dare to hope. Then act.

DataPortability Logo Competition

As many of you may know Red Hat recently sent a Cease and Desist claiming that our DataPortability logo was too similar (Identical, in their words) to their Fedora Logo.

While the claim is arguable, we have decided that rather than dispute the issue, we would take the advice of community members to hold a Logo Competition to replace the current logo with a new one.

So I would like to announce the “DataPortability Logo Competition”.

Brief:

The logo should:

• Be distinct, unique and easily identifiable
• Remain clear and identifiable at small sizes (e.g. 16×16)
• Convey the concept of moving/owning/syncing data
• Aesthetically fit in with a broad range of site/application designs
• Provide a clear silhouette that can be rendered in multiple colors

As part of the submission, you must be willing to give up all your rights to the copyright and donate it to the community via the DataPortability project.

Submissions can be made via JPG/GIF/PNG however please be prepared to provide high resolution/vector graphic versions of your work.

Prizes:

The main reason for getting involved, of course, is simply to help the community create an important Trust Mark for the emerging Data Portability conversation. As a bonus, however, we are accepting prizes from any vendors who would like to donate to the effort.

Current prize list:

• iPhone from Jive Software
• Weeks ad space on Techcrunch! Thanks to Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch
• A Month ad space on either CenterNetworks (www.centernetworks.com) or
  HTMLCenter (www.htmlcenter.com) thanks to Allen Stern
• $100 from Bub.blicio.us thanks to Brian Solis
• $100 of Compete Credits to get access to premium reports thanks to Jay Meattle at Compete.
• $500 and a “I’d sync that” T-shirt from Plaxo thanks to John McCrea
• An A0 Trendmap from Information Architects
• $100 from HedgeHog Lab
• Free Ticket to Plugg (worth €500) thanks to Robin Wauters

2nd and 3rd Prize will be:

• An A0 Trendmap from Information Architects

If you would like to donate prizes to this competition, please email me. I will update this post to mention sponsors and prizes if any offers come in.

Voting:

The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.

If you have a solid web-based voting solution you can recommend for that stage of the competition, please email me sooner rather than later.

Submission Details:

• Submissions should be made to the Flickr pool.
• The deadline for submissions is March 11 2008

Legal Advice:

Once we have a logo (or at least a short list) we would welcome legal help/advice/sponsorship regarding TM and/or Community Marks so that we can ensure the logo is free and clear of IPR entanglements. If you are a legal firm and would like to sponsor this part of the process, please email me.

Spread the word:

Please help spread the word about this competition so that we can get a great cross-section of contributions and create something the community can be proud to use across the web.

Comment re: Red Hat:

Please do not flame Red Hat for their letter. It is likely that the decision to send the C&D was made by one legal person and is an honest and generic attempt to protect their TM. As a group, we hope to work with all vendors/organizations to play nice and create a healthy DataPortability enabled Internet. We welcome Red Hat to join us.

Please note that while this competition is going on, DataPortability Action Groups will continue to do the real work of promoting best practices and standards for interoperability of personal user data. Watch the timeline for updates.

Don’t forget to submit your logos to the Flickr Pool.

.
Chris Saad,

Co-Founder and Chair, DataPortability Project

Update: You can Digg it here to help spread the word!

I’m nominated for the 30under30

I just got this email from Antihill Magazine:

Dear Young Entrepreneur,

A friend, colleague or fan of your work recently nominated you for Anthill Magazine’s 30under30 Awards, a national awards program designed to recognise and encourage young Australian entrepreneurs.

Details of your nomination are below, including th name of the generous person who nominated you for this awards program.

Cool!

If you’d like to nominate me you can do so on the Antihill website!

Some challenges in current DataPortability trends

In the last couple of weeks there have been a number of very positive steps forward for Data Portability in general and the DataPortability Project specifically.

These include wins by the OpenID Foundation, the IC report, the DataPortability Report and others.

A couple of trends, though, are causing me a little concern and may require a slight course correction before they spin out of control and fragment, rather than standardize, the ecosystem.

1. Tightly coupled OpenID Implementations

On Plaxo right now there is a ‘Sign in with YahooID’ button. This is effectively an OpenID login mechanism, except to remove the user experience complexity of OpenID, Plaxo has worked with Yahoo to make it easier by creating a direct relationship.

This seems antithetical to the promise of OpenID and could ultimately create another mess of tightly coupled vendor relationships that defeat the purpose of a single sign-on identity that any provider can provide and consume.

A more long term solution must be to improve the generic OpenID user experience or devise an education campaign to help users learn the new login process.

2. Google’s Social Graph API

While revealing an enormous usefulness in the existing XFN and FOAF data out on the web, Google’s Social Graph API also reveals a weakness in current XFN and FOAF implementations. Many users are not aware when XFN data is included around URLs they enter, much less when the URLs are marked as rel=me.

For example when Twitter asked me for my homepage, I didn’t understand that I was asserting a semantic link from Twitter to my blog that Google would later document and carve into stone as part of its implicit global social network in the sky.

As it stands, there is a real concern for user backlash as these APIs start being implemented and users find themselves presented with eerily accurate information about themselves magically appearing on websites without their ‘consent’.

Some sort of best practice text and/or iconography is required around fields that will be marked up with XFN – particularly if rel=me will be used to that users can make informed decisions about the type of data they provide and how it might be used. Perhaps even an opt out checkbox is appropriate.

This is probably a job for the Microformat community to dig into and solve. They should probably solve it quickly though.

3. OpenSocial++

As OpenSocial implementations role out, it’s becoming clear that there is no such thing as a pure OpenSocial container. Each container includes proprietary APIs and extensions that widget developers may choose to use.

Presumably these exist to differentiate each network and encourage developers to write enhanced apps for the environment.

The problem, though, is that developers need to write defensively for each custom API leading us to a place similar to browser compatibility hell. App developers will need to write and test their apps across every Container and will either have to hard code support for special APIs or keep their apps generic and ordinary.

Is this sustainable? Is there a better way?

If OpenSocial is going to be the Write Once, Deploy Many model for widgets, then the OpenSocial team at Google need to find a way to address this concern quickly.