(Note: I needed this post here to force an update to Google search results – long story … I’m not navel gazing here)

The SAO is in its 20th year of providing great programs, events and benefits. We need a favor. The SAO is working to develop a clearer strategic vision of where the organization should go. This process involves thinking about the role of the organization in a new ways, using new organizational tools.

Please give us a few minutes of your time to share your thoughts and vision for the SAO: http://bit.ly/saotomorrow

After completing the short interactive survey, could you please forward this note onto others who might be interested in this conversation? There are about 50,000 people involved in the software industry in Oregon. We want to reach as many of them as possible. And for this we also need your help.

I’ll be publishing the results of the survey next week and will be sure to share them in as many places as possible.

Thank you.

First up, I’d I thought I would share a Q & A we recently did with Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com. Peter is the Director of Platform Research at Salesforce and he’s going to be speaking next week on cloud computing with his talk entitled Code for the Cloud.

Let’s get to it:

Q:: Almost everyone has heard of “cloud” computing. Yet, few of us truly understand it. What is the impact of cloud computing on the average user?

A:: If you look at where the real excitement has been in personal computing during the past several years, it has not been on the desktop or the laptop: it’s been in the cloud, with tools like Google Calendar and Facebook and Flickr and with access devices like the iPhone and other Web-capable handhelds. The fastest-growing segments of the end-user hardware market are those that come closest to being no hardware at all: the handhelds and the netbook-class PCs, whose primary function is convenient connection to the cloud. That’s where people are finding the most compelling end-user experience available, today and even more so in the future.

Individual users, small and medium business users, and even the largest enterprises are discovering the massive economies and the far more rapid pace of innovation and adoption that the cloud computing model can provide. That applies to both the best practices embodied in packaged (and customizable) applications, like Salesforce CRM, or the open-ended development opportunities of cloud platforms like Force.com. Personal communities, customer and partner ecosystems, and modern business processes are all being built, and expanded and refined, at Internet speed.

Q:: Do you see interest in the cloud exploding internationally now as well? Which countries have really picked it up?

A:: In the past year, I’ve made multiple visits to Europe, Central/South America, India and the Pacific Rim. In all of those places, I find enormous interest among business stakeholders in modernizing their systems and building their customer and partner ecosystems without capital investment and without high-risk, long-delay software development.

Countries like India, with enormous growth in their mid-market sector and without large legacy investments in older technologies, are growing their use of cloud resources at twice the pace of the rest of the world. For software entrepreneurs in these countries, the cloud represents far more rapid entry at far lower cost to a global market of customers in every sector of business and industry. Brazil and China are other notable centers of cloud adoption, but the cloud is the focus of new IT projects in every market that I visit.

No one, in any part of the world, is planning major new initiatives based on the on-premise model. The cost and complexity burdens of that aging model are clear, and are still growing, while any remaining concerns about the cloud are rapidly being addressed by enterprise service providers like salesforce.com.

Q:: If I were shopping for a new computer system, how should I evaluate the storage merits of a hard drive if I’m wanting to embrace this new concept of cloud computing?

A:: The old model of PC purchasing treated the hard drive as part of the PC system. As you get more accustomed to having anywhere/anytime access to all of your information assets, you’ll start thinking of your personally owned storage devices as just one part of the pool of storage that’s available to you.

You’ll start thinking of the hard drive on a PC or laptop as mainly the boot-up device and the local cache for things you want to use on that 14-hour trans-Pacific flight, at least until next year when in-flight Internet starts becoming common on every route. Going forward, personal storage purchasers should start to think about network-connected storage units, with their own preferred level of security measures such as full-disk encryption, that they can attach to their home network hub and use — or share, selectively — throughout the cloud, wherever the Net can reach.

Q:: I am sure you get a lot of concerns from customers about the security of data in their cloud. What is the salesforce.com attitude on security?

A:: Almost every real-world incident of data theft, breach, or loss turns out to involve someone who was authorized to have access to that data — and who misused that access, either by ignorance or carelessness or with deliberate intent. That risk has nothing to do with where data is stored, but it has everything to do with who has access privileges and how people actually interact with information resources.

An enterprise cloud environment gives the owner of an IT asset far more visibility into who’s using what information, when, from where, and can enable far more precise control of who’s allowed to use which resources in which ways. The cloud model reduces the tendency for desktops, laptops, USB keys and other user-managed devices to wind up holding data that’s not being used, but is all too easily lost.

A simple flush of the browser cache can eliminate any residual data from a cloud-computing session: if a laptop gets lost or stolen, it’s annoying, but it’s no longer catastrophic. If a user’s machine crashes, logging in from any other machine gets the user back to work right away, without losing even a minute’s worth of current work or task history. Meanwhile, data that’s stored in an enterprise-grade cloud facility gets the affordable protections of world-class physical security, robust facility construction, and professional system management at levels that few companies can cost-effectively provide for themselves.

Q:: What kind of technology and development applications does cloud computing bring to the developer community?

A:: During the past two years, there’s been a massive shift in developer interest from the desktop to the cloud. Developer surveys for almost the past two decades found developers mainly focused on a single dominant desktop computing platform, but lately that platform has dramatically slowed its pace of creating new developer opportunities — while the Web application market has been surging at a tremendous rate. Current surveys find developers mainly interested in understanding the skills required to combine a rich user experience with the convenience and the collaborative power of the cloud.

Fortunately, the same low cost and immediate access of the cloud that developers want to provide to application users are also empowering the developers themselves. Free tools, free documentation, and free access to a community of skilled professionals are no longer exclusive to the world of open-source software: they’re also part of the core value proposition for cloud-based development on Force.com. We offer developers free Eclipse-based tooling, and a free Developer Account environment (with sign-up at http://developer.force.com) for learning, building, and even showing an application to prospective customers: there’s no money charged until the developer has real customers who want to log in and get to work.

In January I joined the SAO’s board of directors with a very large freshman class of board members. When then-President Harvey Mathews recruited me to join the board last year, he was doing so because of my engagement with the local independent developer and consulting groups here in Portland. I was excited to bring a growing segment of software developers perspective to the board and my first few months on the board have been quite enjoyable as the organization continues to expand its programs.

With Harvey stepping down and me spinning up my own consulting business, the timing seemed right for me to interview for the interim President role and the search committee agreed. I firmly believe there is a great opportunity to link up the experience of current SAO members with that of the entrepreneurial spirit and drive of the independent developer community here in the Northwest.

I’m really looking forward to working with the amazing staff of the SAO to continue its fantastic mission. More to come.

I’ve been in the technology space for awhile now. I started as a system administrator/engineer almost ten years ago and that morphed into a novice developer then open source participant/helper then open web evangelist then leading an engineering team building great products and finally, to selling bacon on the Internet.

“Wait, WTF?!” you say? “You sell bacon on the Internet?!”

Yes. Yes I do.

Its really hard to explain but selling bacon is honestly one of the most interesting/fun things I’ve ever done. Its not just technology-for-the-sake-of-technology. Jason, Michael and I created something out of nothing using off-the-shelf tools to make a solution that delivers real things to real people. And we did it all in less than a month.

While meeting with one of our Bac’n advisors (and hopefully future partner) this past week she summed it up best. After years selling and building technology, she was kind of over with it. “I’m tired of technology. I like solutions and business models that can be affected by technology.” You can see why we’re talking to her.

In any case, for about the last two weeks I’ve been flying solo. Doing Bac’n and putting a few feelers out to close friends and colleagues to see what there is to see that better fits my new found love of technology and a business model. I’ve been astounded by the response and there are quite a few interesting opportunities out there.

I’m still going to participate in open web work and helping to develop technologies that keep data free and put the consumer at the center. That’s something that I think is just too much a part of me not to do. However, my journey henceforth will be rooted in figuring out how building a community can be a good thing for your business.

(Note: I resisted the urge to title this post “Ship it” because I knew there would be some serious twitter hate happening – and rightfully so … hahaha)

There have been several questions asked to the OpenID general mailing list and so I thought I would take the time to answer some (all?) of them here. I’m sure I’ve missed some so I’m sorry for that. If you have follow-up questions, feel free to post them here for me.

What would you have done differently if given the chance?

I’d love the benefit of hindsight but the reality is, I wouldn’t change a thing.

When I first got involved with OpenID it was because I had seen the benefits of how open source had affected traditional software and I saw some of those same themes being applied “up the stack” to OpenID. I was excited to see a simple, open effort to start tackling the issues of on-line identity. Back in 2006, there were still a lot of competing technologies in this space; XRI, Lid, Sxip, etc. It was quickly apparent that we needed to get to convergent on light-weight identity lest we miss a chance to build something great for the Internet. It took a few months but by the end of 2006 we had convergence and a small, focused community that had come together to develop and promote OpenID.

By this time we had a lot of the bigger companies out there looking at this technology as well. Their biggest concerns (privately at the time) were the IP ramifications around the technology. The big guys didn’t want to jump into the fray and then have somebody sue them because they had deep pockets. This was one of the primary drivers of the OIDF in the beginning and it was probably the most unsexy work ever. But it had to be done and it continues to this day.

We knew that we wanted to build an organization that could support both the community and the large players that would use the technology. We looked at a lot of different models and even flirted with moving OpenID into the Apache Software Foundation for a time. In the end, we developed a hybrid approach with community and corporate board members for the OIDF. It hasn’t been easy; it was a difficult process to develop on our own but its one that has built in sustainability into the organization while still allowing autonomy for the technology and the community as a whole. Only time will tell if we made the right decisions.

What’s your vision for OpenID and what role does the OIDF play in making it a reality?

I’d like to see OpenID evolve into a solution that makes social networking a feature on the Internet (and not just a site you go to). Today, OpenID is a technology that solves a specific thing and does it with a few shortcomings like security and usability. To get beyond this and take it to the next level, its going to require working closely with the communities developing technologies like OAuth, XRD, Portable Contacts and the like. Fortunately, most of the people developing these technologies are a part of the OpenID community already.

The best thing the OIDF can do to help make this a reality is to stay out of the way. By that I mean, the technology continues to evolve and its the details like IPR, trademarks, etc that need to be sorted out (by the OIDF) but that can hinder adoption if not taken into consideration. I’m all for workgroups to help with usability and security but I think a lot of these things are already happening in the community.

Facebook Connect is a great example of what this could look like. The benefit that Facebook has is that they can enforce the look-and-feel; if you don’t do it the way they say, they can pull the plug on you. This isn’t the case for the solutions we’re building so we have to get to consensus and then worry about distribution. This is a slower model but I do think its a better one. Facebook Connect (and derivatives like Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID, etc) will continue to gain market share and momentum while we figure out the details of how all of this is supposed to work. Slow-and-steady-and-open “wins” the race.

What is the role of privacy as it relates to OpenID and how does the OIDF help/hinder that?

I don’t believe in privacy; not because I’m against it but more because I believe its impossible to achieve. Don’t vote for me if you’re hoping I’ll help drive this technology to be more “privacy” friendly. I won’t. My goal is to help develop OpenID into a solution that can help you share and participate across the Internet as you (not some ‘anonymous coward’). I put myself in the Esther Dyson camp on privacy these days:

I was a much bigger fan of anonymity then than I am now. I thought it was cool. And it is, but it turns out anonymity really encourages bad behavior. I’m not in favor of the government tracking everybody and so forth, [but] at least persistent pseudonyms and communities and stuff like that makes everything a nicer place.

It’s like a lot of things. I’m pro choice, but I think abortion is an unfortunate thing. I think the same thing about anonymity: Everybody should have the right to it, but it’s not something one wants to encourage. And that’s not weasel words, that’s the reality of it.

– Esther Dyson, Veteran tech investor looking back on the evolution of the Net

What are your thoughts on organizational transparency?

Easy: everything should be done in the open that can be. The only times for private conversations are for legal or other sensitive matters (like the hiring of an ED who hasn’t given notice to his current employer). Other than that, financials, technology, board and any other discussions that are happening should be done so in a completely transparent nature.

If elected, what would be your first order(s) of business?

The OIDF has some hard questions to answer about itself. In the first 90 days, the board needs to tackle the following:

1. Determine the role of the foundation wrt the technology; is OpenID a building block technology or a full-blown solution?
2. Define the mission/vision for the organization based on (1).
3. Define clear goals and milestones for “success” based on the mission/vision from (2).
4. At this critical time with OpenID, I believe the OIDF should hire an executive director to help drive initiatives that speak to the mission/vision and goals outlined in (3).
5. Engage developer communities building technology and start to get real-world demos of this “open stack” playing together. We can’t learn anything by talking about it; we need to lead with code. I would see this manifest itself as some sort of developer gathering a la the UX Summit at Yahoo! earlier this year and would be focused on usability and security.
6. Take action on the results from the CRC committee work; what does the industry need/expect from the OIDF? Let’s get a plan of attack together and execute on it.

After the first 90 days the board should come back and evaluate how they have done, determine what needs to be changed and then iterate again.

In Closing

I’d love to continue to serve on the OIDF board of directors and hope you’ll vote for me. Thank you.

In May 2008, the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) board had a face-to-face meeting at Google where we were planning for the next year. During that meeting we started to discuss focus and scope of the OIDF and realized that there was a much bigger need in the community of developers creating light-weight, open specifications for the web. Ironically, there were several other people visiting Google that day and over lunch, we hatched an idea that has finally been formalized today.

As a bit of history, when we created the OIDF, we learned quite a bit about what it takes for individuals and companies to come together within a community to develop and open specification. Out of this work, we developed a process for managing IP and copyrights as well as built a strong relationship among a good portion of people working on these problems across the web. It wasn’t all easy and many communities developing other open specifications learned quite a bit from us. We wanted to find a way to make it so others wouldn’t have to go through this hassle ever again.

To answer several of the pain points around getting an open specification to be able to be used in the marketplace and keep community members writing code and specs and not legal documentation, several of us came together to create the Open Web Foundation. I’d talked about this in Februrary at the Social Graph FooCamp and DeWitt has been talking about it for years … :-)

The most up-to-date information about the OWF can be found on the website but there are a few things I’ll mention here. The OWF is an organization modeled after the Apache Software Foundation; we wanted to use a model that has been working and has stood the test of time. The OWF will only focus on specifications; we won’t touch code. There are plenty of other places to do that.

The hard part is yet to come. There is a lot of work to do here but I’m excited to be a part of such a fantastic group of people. I have never seen so many people come together to make something so fantastic happen so quickly. Congrats again, and let’s roll up our sleeves folks.

I’ve known Chris for several years now and its been an absolute pleasure not only to be in the same space but now I get to work with him at Vidoop on a daily basis.

Chris has been an inspiration to me and he truly personifies “open”; I don’t know anybody that has it running through their veins more than he does.

Congrats to you Chris. Its greatly deserved!

I know when I was first introduced to Data Portability I was skeptical but when the ensuing media circus flooded the blogosphere, I had no choice but to jump right in. Many of the people developing the open protocols co-opted by the Data Portability project have hinted (both publicly and privately) at leaving. Others have just outright left.

I don’t have a problem with Data Portability as a whole as much as I do with its leader, Chris Saad. The lack of clarity of vision, the delusions of grandeur and blatant pandering are so frustrating to someone such as myself that has worked so hard to actually do something in this space. I know I’m not alone here, but this week, I reached a tipping point.

First of all, a little history.

David Recordon and I made a point of inviting Chris Saad out to the Social Graph FooCamp in February 2008 as Data Portability was really starting to take the main stage. On the last day, at the eleventh hour, Saad led a talk on Data Portability that got rather heated. Chris Messina, Joseph Smarr, Jeremy Keith, Tantek and many, many others were there saying the same thing: we’re already having these discussions, why do we have to do it now at dataportability.org? We left Sebastopol that afternoon hoping to have Chris Saad really carry on the conversation with the wider audience he had brought to the table. Instead, we continued to hear more calls of “come join the conversation on dataportability.org” coupled with empty press releases instead of real leadership.

At the Data Sharing Workshop where Marc Canter put it all into context for me (and then he prodded me again yesterday). Data Portability is about APML riding along with the rest of the well-known and established Open Web protocols.

Marc and I have had our differences in the past, but on this we both agree.

I’ve always been in the Chris Messina Don’t-stab-babies-in-the-face camp with respect to data portability. Lower-case data portability embodies many of the same ideals around the Open Web. Many small open building blocks, loosely joined helping to enable data exchange and control for users. How can you not like that?!

My reasons are particularly personal for not wanting to participate in Data Portability anymore. I’ve spent close to the last two years chairing the OpenID Foundation board. I’ve seen a fantastic community coalesce out of nothing to create a technology that has been widely adopted. When Data Portability pulled OpenID into its technology stack, I was actually really excited. However, with the expectations set by the media around Data Portability and the lack of follow-through has the potential to negatively impact all of the hard work by these existing communities have done.

My tipping point about this came earlier this week when Jive Software joined the Data Portability group. I love the folks at Jive, have known them for years and always wish them well. However, its a bummer that even folks from my hometown can be misled by this DP media hoopla. When I read Sam Lawrence say:

In the meantime, we’re interested in working with the Data Portability group to help contribute to these standards as well as new ones as well. Hopefully, the organization is now at a point in its evolution to proceed with formal and elected leadership, a standards body, voting process and the rest of the stuff that makes organizations successful.

I realized even Jive had been fooled by the hype around Data Portability. DP is not about creating new technology:

Some things that The DataPortability Project is not:

• We are not a group focused on creating new technologies. DataPortability intends to work with tools that already exist today.
• The group is primarily focused on consumer facing technologies and not those aimed at corporate internal use.

Chris was quoted in Jive’s press release. He knew about this announcement. And yet, as he did with the “Data Availability” release that MySpace did, he opted to “take-all-comers” instead of stay focused on the specific mission of the Data Portabililty project.

More importantly, its not where the discussions about these protocols are happening. They are already happening on openid.net, oauth.net, microformats.org and many, many others. I’m excited to see people talking about OpenID within the Data Portability project, but I feel like they are actually taking away from the existing communities and misleading the new members of the Data Portability community.

I put the blame for this type of messaging and lack of clarity squarely on the back of Chris Saad. I’m actually really amazed at the quality of people that have joined the Data Portability community. They are well-spoken, understand the meaning of collaborative discussion and are very passionate about the project itself. But Chris hasn’t shown the ability to stick to the goals and mission of his organization and community. In fact, the DP community does a better job of staying on point than Chris does.

David Recordon is on the right track; how do you support the Open Web? To me, the Open Web is what this is all about. The Open Web is the key to the centralized me or citizen-centric web we hear so many people talking about. Without interoperable formats and protocols, all of this stuff will be a pipe dream.

Instead of just complaining, I’m going to continue focusing my efforts where I think I can make the most impact. I’m going to continue working hard to promote and enable the OpenID community, I’m going to continue to encourage and engage in discussions with projects like OAuth, microformats, DiSo and others and I encourage everyone to join me in doing the same.

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.