Articles by kveton

When I first started using Open Source back in 1997 I thought for sure; this is the thing that’s going to change the world. And for the most part, that’s how it has played out. The software industry has been transformed because of the innovations of communities of people across the globe. This kind of collaboration had to move up the stack.

I discovered OpenID in February of 2006 and I knew it was the seed of something fantastic. Collaborative software development had given us the operating system, desktop applications and pretty soon we were starting to talk about the implications of the Open Web.

The Open Web was a nebulous concept but once the realization became that it was about the data, things really started to make sense. After the data was in the cloud, a whole host of issues arise on how to describe, share and control that data. There were missteps and half-attempts at how to do it and even today we’ve got some of the biggest players on the Internet “opening up”, but really only part-of-the-way.

It dawned on me in early 2007 that we needed to do something more if OpenID was going to take off. People weren’t going to the Internet saying “Please give me OpenID!!” Users want things that work. Users want solutions. OpenID is a fantastic technology, but the reality is, my mom got email, she didn’t get SMTP. The same will be true of OpenID.

I didn’t realize that as we moved up the stack, so too would the complexity and needs of the users. Its not about geeky things like how do I open a Word document or serve HTTP requests. Instead, how do I collaborate with many like-minded people? How do I move my data between devices and services? How do I organize quickly into an ad-hoc group? These are real problems looking for real solutions.

Around about this time new technologies started to emerge solving similar but different problems that OpenID had solved. Defining the data (microformats). Enabling access (OAuth). Enabling communications (XMPP). All of these technologies existed and were immensely open but completely decoupled. Slowly but surely a lot of people (and I mean a lot of people) started to connect the dots. In the immortal words of my Father-in-law: “We have the technology.” It just wasn’t a full-fledged solution yet.

We needed small pieces that were loosely joined to get where we were going.

I’ve been watching the work of Google, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! closely as they all have a vested interest in “social networking”. Its only Google today that understands that social networking is a feature of every site and not the function of a site. Even there, I think Google is missing the point that we need to make this user-centric and not site-centric. In any case, these big companies are working hard to open up. They are headed towards something the people working on the Open Web have already discovered.

One of the most interesting projects to me as of late has been DiSo. DiSo is short for Distributed Social Networking and is the work of several developers working out in the open, developing real solutions for real users. The mantra of the DiSo team has been one that I can relate to coming from the open source world; lead with code. This touches me right where my Open Source roots come from and I love it.

The reality is the solution for users that makes social networking a feature on every site has OpenID as a foundational component but its not the one thing. Now don’t get me wrong, I love OpenID. Its been an amazing ride for me and I will always continue to support it. However, I firmly believe that OpenID is but a building block (albeit an extremely important one) in the grand scheme of things. This building block needs to be crafted, tweaked and modified over time to work well and fit nicely with the other building blocks that make up the Open Web.

Getting to where we’re heading it going to take time and the right people. Since I’ve joined Vidoop in February of this year I’ve known that this is an amazing team on a path to change the Internet. That’s why I’m really excited that Chris Messina and Will Norris are joining the fantastic team at Vidoop. I’ve known both of them in different capacities over the past few years and I’ve always wanted to work with them on real solutions for real users.

In the coming months, you’ll be seeing myVidoop evolve around some of the work that they have been doing as well as the introduction of some new products that solve real problems with open technology. I’m excited to see what they can contribute to the DiSo project when they are fully focused on it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … the best is yet to come.

Did you know that Innotech is this week? This is a great local conference that draws people from the whole region with some fantastic world-class speakers. Sean Lowery has done another amazing job lining up speakers and building out several new tracks. Highlights include:

• eMarketing Summit: Two full days of Online Marketing presentations focused on “How To” & real-world business to business scenarios.
• NW CIO Summit: An exclusive Special Event @ InnoTech, the NW CIO Summit is open only to executive level IT professionals.
• Open Source Summit: A full day of dedicated Open Source presentations - Open to All Attendees
• Clean Technology Track: A full day of Clean Tech presentations, on Wednesday, 4/16, presented by SAO’s Clean Tech Forum
• Non Profit Technology Summit: The Non Profit Technology Summit features seminars specifically focused on technology issues of nonprofits.

I hope to see you there. I’ll be presenting at the Open Source Summit for the ‘Open in Oregon Lightning Talks’ and the CIO Beta Summit Demo. Amazingly these are at the exact same time so that should be interesting; you’ll get to see me in a dead sprint between session rooms. :-)

You should really make time to attend this event; its a fantastic place to network and catch up with all of the latest things happening in Portland and the Northwest. If you’re around make sure to Twitter about it and let’s connect!

When we look back at 2008 it will be the year that we saw as the start of something great with freeing users’ data and putting it in their control. We’ve already seen some great momentum around the Data Portability project and seen some great events (such as SG FooCamp ‘08). Several more events are just on the horizon and you should make sure you attend.

The first event is the Data Sharing Workshop happening April 18th and 19th in downtown San Francisco. This is happening on a Friday and Saturday so as to best accommodate the needs of attendees and with it right in the city we should see a larger audience for something further down the peninsula.

Directly following IIW 2008a we’ll be having the Data Sharing Summit. This will be a chance for stakeholders across the entire data portability eco-system to come together and talk brass tacks about what we’re trying to accomplish and how to make it a reality. We’ll be focusing on specific technical details and how we’re going to get from point A (today) to point B (tomorrow).

Why two events so close together? Well, we’ve got a lot of work to do and we’re already a quarter of the way through 2008. If you’re at all interested in participating in the data sharing/portability conversation these are the two events to attend without question.

I hope to see you there!

Through snow, sleet, hail, rain and of course a fair mix of sun yesterday’s Startupalooza was a fantastic success. Organized by Todd Kenefsky with a whole host of volunteers and the rest of the Legion of Tech pitching in as well it was a great event and I got a chance to put a lot of faces with (mostly Twitter) names.

Highlights for me included:

• Hearing the Jive Software story (complete with embarrassing photos)
• Meeting Matt King and Jason Glaspey (the Unthirsty guys)
• Seeing @ahockley totally decked out with a lot of photo gear I wish I had
• Buying drinks/food for folks at the Side Door afterwords thinking the bill was huge only to have it be $360
• Realizing that Garage Games is actually a ginormous endeavor
• Getting to meet the Toonlet guys
• Realizing that gamers and people with connections to NYC seem to do well in Portland

And, as is the case at any event in Portland, there were the seedlings hatched for new events. One was an impromptu idea that Paul Biggs (aka @techpaulogy) had called #drunkgeeking. Say you’re married, with an SO, etc and they have gotten tired of your inebriated ramblings about technology. Wouldn’t it make sense to find a couple of other nerds you could get your drink on with and then talk about geeky topics? Instead of trying to organize it on a regular basis, why not just use Twitter + the hashtag #drunkgeeking to coordinate on-the-fly events. For example, you could couple this with Unthirsty and find a good happy hour, Tweet “#drunkgeeking in 15 minutes at the Side Door” and see what happens. I love it and am looking forward to it after Paul gets done with his three day pantless bender. :-)

While at Startupalooza, Matt King demoed a new application he’s working on for a few folks that were there. Its in the Alpha stage but he wanted to get the take of some folks that could take a hard look while drilling down into the actual details of the application. This could be really handy for folks if we formalized it. Pick someone’s office, an afternoon and choose 2 or 3 applications to critique. To participate you have to have something you’d want looked at in the coming weeks/months. You’d want high quality participation and it would be great to have a mix of devs, designers and (*gasp*) even a marketer or two … :-)

All in all I was amazed at the vibrance of the Portland startup scene … clearly there is something here, clearly we’re just starting to pick up the pace here … I can’t imagine anywhere else on earth I’d rather be working and living.

I did the Beer and Blog tonight on how to OpenID enable your blog. Thanks to Justin Kistner for inviting me and thanks to everybody for showing up to hear me talk about OpenID (again and again and again) … ha!

The gist of tonight was to show folks how easy it is to OpenID enable their blogs. With most folks using Wordpress these days, I did a basic install of Wordpress 2.5 RC1 with the wpopenid plugin that Will Norris has built. From a couple of zip files to a full-fledged blog its about 5 minutes total work if you know what you’re doing.

If you want to use your own domain as an OpenID, check out Sam Ruby’s post about OpenID delegation to learn more. (Note: see here if you want to do delegation with myVidoop - yes, shameless plug).

Now, some folks don’t necessarily want to use Wordpress. No problem, there are plenty of other OpenID enabled blog platforms and content management systems. Here are a few more (feel free to leave comments if I missed anything):

• Moveable Type 4.0 - This is a great alternative to Wordpress and Six Apart has really started to put some extra work into making this a great platform for your blog.
• Drupal - Drupal is one of the premier content management systems out there and starting with Drupal 6.0, OpenID (both consumer and producer) is built-in by default. This is a CMS that has really started to mature into a fantastic piece of software with an amazing community.
• MediaWiki - MediaWiki is the defacto leader in wiki applications out there. With the OpenID extension you can make it even easier to create and manage your own wiki with ease.
• Joomla - Another CMS, Joomla with its OpenID extension allows full-integration.
• dotnetnuke - As hard as it is for some folks to believe, people actually build some cool applications on .NET. One of those (and that has native OpenID support), is dotnetnuke which is a content management system for Windows.
• Roll your own - You might want to roll your own applications. If so, check out OpenID Enabled which is a great resource for specific OpenID libraries.

These are just a few of the many applications, frameworks and libraries that are available for OpenID-ifying your sites. Now, Go forth and implement OpenID today!

Marshallk talked about it and David Recordon did as well and Kevin Fox wrote about it yesterday but I thought I’d mention something about it as well.

Yesterday, Ma.gnolia deployed new login infrastructure that is 100% OpenID only. You don’t create a Ma.gnolia account anymore, you come with your OpenID, Facebook account or some other means of login.

Why is this a big deal? Well, it turns out spammers like to create accounts for bogus link love on Ma.gnolia. This stinks for Larry and his crew but also for the community that has grown up around this great site. By pushing this off to other sites, now the Ma.gnolia folks can focus on what makes their site great; not stopping spammers.

This is a really interesting trend and I think something is going to bubble out of this; reputation. We need to be able to take advantage of the fact that a) I have lots of accounts and b) I can link them to one OpenID to prove that this-is-likely-a-real-person.

Props to Larry and his team … well done guys.

One of the most lively discussions at SG FooCamp was the Data Portability talk. Chris Saad was the host and a bevy of folks (Chris Messina, daveman692, Eran Hammer-Lahav, jsmarr, Tantek, Adactio, John Panzer, Eran Sandler and many others) were there talking about how to turn all of the Data Portability energy and excitement into something tangible. One of the ideas was for Chris Saad to turn DataPortability.org into the place for the discussion about how all of these technologies can work together and hopefully relate the conversations happening in each of the communities.

I know Chris has done a few of these videos already:

• http://seesmic.com/v/Co8lFpDaMz
• http://seesmic.com/v/fN4utUYa6C
• http://seesmic.com/v/laUHx3ie9j
• http://seesmic.com/v/qcdpwCUX4l
• http://seesmic.com/v/sb8qjEF57p
• http://seesmic.com/v/Dk76sdlGMk

This is a great start and I want to do my part. I like the ideas, momentum and people that have come around the Data Portability Workgroup, so this weekend at SXSW 2008 I’m going to actually do something instead of just listening quietly on the mailing lists … :-)

Myself (look for me in some sort of Portland/Bacon themed t-shirt) and fellow Vidoop partner-in-crime Luke Sontag will be prowling walking the expo floor, taking in sessions, attending pre/post events, raiding BarCamp Austin III and everywhere in between seeking out your thoughts on Data Portability, the Open Web, portable social networking, DiSo, whatever. These topics mean a lot of things to a lot of people and most importantly to those of us in each of our communities (OpenID, OAuth, microformats, etc). The goal is to simply document thoughts from people in the space (and not just the “leaders” either) and make it accessible to everyone wanting to participate in the conversation. Hopefully this will increase awareness and help people come together more effectively on the problems at hand.

A few of the questions I’d like to pose:

• What has the impact of the Open Web been for you, your work or the applications that you use?
• What does Data Portability mean for the work that you’re doing today? For the applications that you use?
• Is portable/distributed social networking/DiSo possible and what are some steps to move it in the right direction today? Where should we be by 2009?
• Every web site seems to have a life streaming component now, does it matter? Is it relevant? What are your thoughts on life/action streaming?
• OpenID and OAuth both have the concept of an end-point that does interesting things for the user. What are some possibilities for this end-point with relation to the work you’re doing? The applications you’re using?
• Google announced the beta of Google Health and its inevitable that more and more of our data will be ending up on-line. Is this a good thing? How can you better manage and protect this data?

These will be short, bite-sized interviews (hopefully under 5 minutes or so) and we’ll get them on-line as quickly as our crack video team can get them up. I’ve already lined up a few really great people to chat with so far and am looking for more. Would you like to weigh in on the questions above? Do you have other questions you’d like to ask? Comment below and I’ll either work the question in or find you at SXSW. See you all in Austin!

What a week its been. This past weekend was SG FooCamp ‘08 (more on that below), on Tuesday I got a new job and then yesterday we made the long-awaited announcement around Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joining the OpenID Foundation board. Add to that trying to get a house ready to sell, moving, finding new office space in Portland and speaking at Ignite Portland 2 this has easily been the craziest (and most fun) week I’ve had in years. I really wish I’d had time to write this post earlier in the week.

What I really want to talk about here is about where we’re at now that the dust has settled from SG FooCamp ‘08. When David and I cooked up this event we had one thing in mind and it quickly morphed into something else. The outcome from my perspective was an entirely positive one. Lots of amazing people got to make some really great connections, people hacked on code, discussions (heated and otherwise) were heartfelt and engaging all weekend long.

That said, I’ve certainly taken my fair share of abuse for organizing the event. It was invite-only and for that I’m more than willing to take some heat. David and I chose the invite list and the reality was, there was a finite amount of room (we somehow crammed 105 people in over the weekend and a good chunk of those slept in tents in 30F+ weather). Okay, so where does that leave us?

In my travels this past week, in blog posts I’ve read, in people I’ve seen (even at Ignite Portland) it was clear that everyone wished they could be at SG FooCamp ‘08. People want an open discussion about these things. Me too. And even more so now that we had this event last weekend. Social graph/data portability/distributed social networking/etc … this is as much of a technical problem as it is a policy and best practices one. The weekend showed to me the passion that a small group could have around this space. What if we expanded the scope significantly?

We already have the Internet Identity Workshop as well as the Data Sharing Summit. Both of these are open-space style events and both are really well attended and organized. I think there is room for something combined or even expanded in scope.

I can foresee two tracks to an event like this. One would cover the hacking pieces. How can we use XMPP? What does Google’s Social Graph API reveal? What are the hard problems devs are dealing with? The other track would cover the policy and best practices components. How do we put users in control of their data? What should be the rules/best practices around scrapping? Who owns my data? Yes, I’m suggesting that we bring together a cross-section of people to discuss this. This could/should even be an extension of the DataPortability work going on. Its not a contest and its not about size, but I could easily see 1000 people coming to an event like this and I can only imagine the intensity and camaraderie being 10x what we had at SG FooCamp ‘08.

Okay, so … who’s going to do it? I was really hoping to hear word of a another Data Sharing Summit from Marc and Kaliya. I think its a great basis for this event and I’d love to help make it a reality. The sooner the better in my opinion. People are hungry to discuss this and with the maturation of technologies like OpenID, OAuth and microformats we have the building blocks we need to make it happen. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves, anybody else?

Its been a long time coming and certainly a huge milestone for OpenID. Everyone on the board is really excited about this news. Here are a few snippets of the coverage:

• O’Reilly Radar - OpenID Foundation - Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo
• ReadWriteWeb - OpenID News: Big Co’s Put Money Where Their Mouths Are
• Dick Hardt - Industry Giants join OpenID Foundation Board
• VeriSign Innovation - OpenID Foundation: Does the world really need yet another identity organization?
• TechCrunch - OpenID Welcomes Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM
• Mike Jones of Microsoft - Microsoft Joins the OpenID Foundation and its Board of Directors
• Mashable - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign Join OpenID Foundation
• TechCrunch UK - Google, Microsoft, Verisign and IBM join OpenID

(links courtesy of daveman692)

As always, the best is yet to come … :-)

I’m at SFO on my way back to Portland after a fantastic weekend in Sebastopol, CA at SG FooCamp ‘08. A really, really huge thanks to Tim O’Reilly, Sara Winge, Tony and the rest of the O’Reilly staff for providing a fantastic venue for this event. Also, we had some great sponsors in BBC, Google, MyStrands, Six Apart and Yahoo! We couldn’t have done it without you.

As a little background, David Recordon and I came up with the idea for SG FooCamp literally 44 days ago. The original idea was to get a bunch of hackers together, lock them in a room for a weekend and see what happens with respect to distributed/portable social networking, data portability, etc. Slowly but surely the invite list went from 10, to 25, to 30 … then David mentioned it to Tim and the idea was hatched to turn it into a FooCamp style event and host it in Sebastopol. Sweet. Now we can go all the way up to 70 people. We blew through that about an hour later and by the time all was said and done, we had over 100 people show up for the event.

It rained most of the weekend in Sebastopol (I must have brought it from Oregon with me) but the rain actually forced folks to stay inside and participate … the sessions were fast and furious and some of them pretty intense. It was cramped inside the O’Reilly facility but it sort of reminded me of the old school OSCON events hosted in the basement of the Portland Marriot; small spaces led to so many great conversations (and the booze helped to lubricate things).

Some of my favorite moments:

• Putting names with faces for just about everybody else I follow in Twitter
• Chris Mocko amazing us with his statistical prowess (”I’m less likely to be a werewolf this round”)
• Drinking the XMPP koolaid - XMPP may be the killer app that drives things like OAuth and OpenID … its the data stupid. Really cool stuff Twitter is doing in this space.
• Great OpenID/OAuth discussions
• Portland representin’ with Matt Tucker, Renny Gleeson, Brian Ellin and myself (and technically Brad and David)
• Watching Brad and Eran figure out OpenID <-> Email identifier specification in a matter of minutes.
• Discovery, discovery, discovery.
• Talking about OpenID as a URL (why is that interesting?) as well as UI.
• Realizing that Joseph Smarr is not only a great developer and evangelist for Plaxo, he’s also a great entertainer and tequila provider … err enabler.
• Fantastic Open IPR discussions (yes, this can be fantastic) … I’m always drawn finding an end solution and the idea was hatched for an administrative org like “The Open Web Foundation” to help technologies like OpenID, OAuth and others … who knows if it makes sense … hoping to talk more about this.
• Quality time with Chris Messina.
• Renny Gleeson coining the term “ebrandgelist” and thinking he actually coined it … :-)
• Making Sara Winge laugh and doing my video interview after far, far too much cider.
• Endless games of werewolf until late, late, late into the night.
• Getting to meet Chris Saad and talk seriously about Data Portability (have a whole other post to share on this).
• Sleeping outside both nights while the temperature was in the 30’s … I knew I kept that +15 bag for a reason.

I took about 500 pictures over the weekend and will be posting them on Flickr soon (its going to be tough; Ignite Portland 2 is on Tuesday and I’m not ready!)

What started as a weekend of hacking turned into a chance to bring together a bunch of different folks that don’t necessarily know each other. The biggest thing I’m taking away from this weekend is the direct connection to so many fantastic people. Now when I see their tweets, I’ll hear their voices and see their faces. I don’t know if we’ll do this event again. There was so much interest and we could have done a Social Graph conference on this (easily I think). Hopefully we can weave some of those themes into upcoming events like the Data Sharing Summit or even IIW.

Thanks everybody for participating and I can’t wait to see everybody again soon.