A new nonprofit organization called the Open Web Foundation is launching this morning with backing from some of the biggest companies on the web and the involvement of some of the web's most innovative individuals. Organized in as a decentralized community of developers, in the fashion of the Apache Software Foundation, the OWF will serve as a placeholder for all the legal dirty work that needs to happen in order for data portability to become a reality.
Specifically, the Foundation will work with all the vendors in this space to secure Creative Commons copyrights and promises not to sue each other over the use of data protocols. Think OpenID, OAuth, OEmbed and lots more still in the works. In some ways this dreadfully unsexy work, but in other ways it's just the opposite.
As Scott Kveton, a participant in the the OWF and the Chair of the OpenID foundation, explained to us, the biggest companies on the web "need to know the lineage of code before they are willing to use it, so they know they aren't going to get sued."
Who's behind all of this? The group is going to great pains to de-emphasize the big names involved, but at the bottom of this post are lists of individuals and companies involved in the launch of the Foundation. The group says that much of the work that needs to be done is already underway in respective protocol working groups, but that the Foundation will serve as a placeholder and gathering point.
If someone's going to be taking legal control over these technologies, who exactly are they? The Foundation says its board will be voted on by members in August elections, but that membership is still being worked out. We hope that the whole process will be transparent and collaborative. We suspect that some people may complain that it is not, but we think there is a high probability that everything is going to be ok.
The much celebrated Data Portability Working Group has become a subject of heated debate. Critics allege that the group has been too headline driven, too focused on big companies that don't end up offering meaningful participating and too driven by one individual, co-founder Chris Saad.
Instead of telling Saad to go eat nails, though, the Open Web Foundation is positioning itself as a complementary organization. DataPortability.org can handle the evangelism and the Open Web Foundation will do the behind the scenes work to help developers bring code to market. Not completely behind the scenes, but you know what they mean.
We hope everyone can play nice and work together instead of doing things like publicly attacking individuals or spoiling each others' announcements.
We're excited about this new organization. There's been a clear need and demand for it and we wish them the best of luck in helping make our data portability dreams come true.
For an in depth look at why we believe data portabilty is in the interests of vendors, see our post Towards a Value-Added User Data Economy. For a user's perspective, watch for a forthcoming post here.
Individuals
* Alex Russell
* Anand Iyer
* Angus Logan
* Ben Laurie
* Blaine Cook
* Brady Forrest
* Chris Messina
* Danese Cooper
* Dave Morin
* David Recordon
* Dawn Foster
* DeWitt Clinton
* Dirk-Willem van Gulik
* Eran Hammer-Lahav
* Geir Magnusson
* John McCrea
* Joichi Ito
* Phil Wolff
* Raj Mata
* Ross Turk
* Scott Kveton
* Tim O'Reilly
Supporting our effort
Our efforts are supported by a number of companies and organizations including:
* BBC
* Facebook
* Google
* MySpace
* O'Reilly
* Plaxo
* Six Apart
* Sourceforge
* Vidoop
* Yahoo!
Comments
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I'm very glad to see names like Chris Messina, Scott Kveton, and Tim O'Reilly on board with this... but I still have this nagging feeling about how successful the new group will be.
Don't get me wrong, I hope they're very successful - but I've gotten tired of technologies like OpenID failing to deliver the kind of results some of us have come to expect. Yes, these are recent technologies that are still in development etc. etc., but the talk has gone on for so long with little to show for it.
I'm starting to wonder if a "collaborative" "multi-vendor" "open" "foundation" is the ideal approach to all this.
But once again, I hope I'm wrong - best wishes to the OWF.
Posted by: theharmonyguy | July 24, 2008 12:15 PM
This is good stuff. DataPortability is great at bringing these ideas forward, but the implementation side of things hasn't been moving forward for months. We really needed something like this.
Posted by: Dragos ILINCA | July 24, 2008 11:39 PM
It is insulting that somehow one individual is associated 1 for 1 with regards to DataPortability - plenty of us drive the Project on unannounced things, even though the only public attention on DataPortability are the headlines.
Regardless, as another one of the co-founders of DataPortability, and as of this week appointed to the new 12 person executive (steering) committee, I'm going to do my best to reduce these petty disputes and hope to contribute to the new foundation's development as best as I can.
Posted by: Elias Bizannes
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July 24, 2008 11:40 PM
Elias - many of us understand the weird state this has put all of you into. Please just understand that we love and support all the folks at Dataportability.org. I really believe we can all work together.
Posted by: Marc Canter
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July 24, 2008 11:54 PM
The industry needs meeting places like both DP[F?] and OWF.
High expectation of OWF because it concerns itself with the much-needed legal frameworks for usage rights etc.. we need the equiv's of sth. like GNU's or BSD's or Apache's or MIT's sw licenses, for the open web, and, data portability..
Posted by: MyMesh | July 25, 2008 12:03 AM