Marc's Voice

What we REALLY mean by being open

So it looks like the BigCos are gonna start ‘out-opening’ each other.  As Chris Messina says in a comment he left for me:

“if these Big Co’s start trying to “out-open” each other — then it’ll force them all (including us) to define what we really mean by open… which, seems to me, would be a good thing™.”

This is the “the perfect storm” that Marshall Kirkpatrick referred to.  A moment in time where vested interests match to user’s interests.  What Dave Winer called “aligning the interests of users and investors”

OK - so what DO we mean by truly open distributed world.  Here’s my two cents:

- OpenID works - everyone accepts it - one ID that everyone will accept - and rely upon.

- Data Portability - move your complex set of stuff - anywhere - two-way APIs

- Interoperability - mix and match functionality - use 6A’s blog tool, with Flickr’s media management with Facebook’s social graph, YouTube’s video world, FriendFeed’s conversations and Google’s Apps.  Oh yah - and MySpace Music, Yahoo Sports and PerezHilton.  And wrap it all in Wordpress.

Two great examples of this I write up in my book are distributed friending and distributed access controls.  This is where a dashboard outline is used.

- Distributed standards - based upon an outline in dashboards - this is what my book is about, pdf (bo0k quality), small pdf (screen quality)

- Shared municipal services - shared servers - software infrastructure - this is what I’m teaching at CWRU - getting students to help us build this out!  Textbook for EECS 396, hi-res pdf of textbook, lo-res pdf

- Shared Open Data servers - like a server of web celebs or local historical data

- Routing standards - Universal BlogThis button - so we can route posts and messages to our OWN blogging tool and route one video post to 10 different destinations

- Messaging standards - ThreadsML = identi.ca/laconica + Wave

- Attention Trust marketplace

- VRM - vendor relationship management

I’ll drill down into each of these items on this list - over the next few weeks.  I have a class to teach and a new company to launch here in NEO (North Eastern, Ohio) - so I’m kind of busy.

And besides - the BigCos are working for US now.