The DataPortability Report for January: Good, Bad, and Ugly

The DataPortability initiative just released their report for the month of January. I love the open approach the group has embraced to share the issues, highlights, and progress with the community.

The Good:

The work is being broken down into a bunch of action groups to help get the teams organized and break the work into manageable chunks.

The Bad:

Like many similar efforts, the big vendors agree to participate and make a lot of noise about it, but they haven’t all been doing the real work necessary to make it succeed. With any luck, this open approach will convince some of the vendors that they need to participate and contribute if they want to be part of the initiative.

The Ugly:

There has been quite a bit of criticism of the DataPortability group about the slogan, naming names, vendor hype, and more. The good part is that the group is responding to the criticism in an open and honest manner and making changes to address the issues.

This is just a really quick summary, but you should read the rest of the report for more details.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Finally, A Fast Wonder Redesign

Ahhhh, I have finally finished my redesign of Fast Wonder. Same logo, but with a different look and feel.

Have a look, let me know what you think, and be sure to let me know if you see anything wonky.

Special thanks to:

  • Todd Kenefsky for sitting through many rounds of eye exam type feedback of the “which is better: this or that” variety as I tested various colors, sizes, and shapes.
  • Justin Kistner for convincing me that K2 rocks, providing various bits of advice, and letting me steal his rounded corner graphic 🙂

As a part of the redesign, I’ve also obsoleted fastwonder.com for major pages and moved them into WordPress to make template changes easier. I still use that site for presentations, data files, or other stuff not requiring stylesheets. The what I’m reading and about Fast Wonder pages fall into this category.

Ignite Portland Featured in the Oregonian!

w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?

Thanks to Scott Kveton for the pics:

Update 1/26/08 9:10am PST:

You can now find the Ignite Portland write up online, too (minus the pictures). Thanks to @kveton &  @mfriesen via twitter for the link.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

A few interesting things this week …

Beer and Blog

Beer and Blog

Tags: , ,

Doc Searls Weblog · When social media are neither

Doc Searls Weblog · When social media are neither

Tags:

Viral + Monetizable = StartUp Magic Quadrant – ReadWriteWeb

Viral + Monetizable = StartUp Magic Quadrant - ReadWriteWeb

Tags: , , ,

Microsoft to join DataPortability – Where’s the beef? « Paying Attention

Microsoft to join DataPortability - Where’s the beef? « Paying Attention

Tags: ,

Desperately Seeking Better Collaboration Tools – GigaOM

Desperately Seeking Better Collaboration Tools - GigaOM

Tags: , ,

Booksthatmakeyoudumb

Booksthatmakeyoudumb

Tags: ,

Jive Talks: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

Jive Talks: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

Tags: ,

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Join Us for the First Lunch 2.0 in Portland!

I hope to see everyone at the first Lunch 2.0 held in Portland! Lunch 2.0 is a an excuse to eat lunch with other people (instead of at our desks) and to meet other interesting technology types around Portland. If you have never heard of Lunch 2.0 and want to learn more, you can visit the main Lunch 2.0 site.

You can get all of the details and RSVP on Upcoming for the Portland Lunch 2.0.

The Details:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
AboutUs.org
107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214

A huge thank you to Jake Kuramoto for reminding us that we needed to do one of these in Portland and then for working with AboutUs to actually make it happen!

How XMPP (Jabber) Can Do So Much More Than IM

Matt Tucker (XMPP guru at Jive, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation members involved in setting the standards for XMPP, and my boss 🙂 ) has been spending a lot of time thinking about how the technology industry can benefit from XMPP beyond just as an instant messaging protocol. XMPP is the protocol used by Google’s GTalk IM and most recently AOL has been experimenting with XMPP. Matt’s post on Jive Talks today about how XMPP is the future for cloud services starts to outline some of his thoughts about how XMPP can be used in many other areas:

There’s a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren’t real-time, won’t scale, and often can’t clear the firewall. So, it’s time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow–that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board.

Fixing the polling and scaling problems with XMPP as Tivo has done is compelling, but the built-in presence functionality also offers tantalizing possibilities. Presence includes basic availability information, but is extensible and can also include things like geo-location. Imagine cloud services taking different actions based on where the client is connecting from.

More people, us included, will make the shift to XMPP, which will provide the missing evidence to create momentum toward a tipping point. In fact, I’m happy to announce that Clearspace 2.0 will include a feature that’s powered by an XMPP-based cloud service. We’ll be publishing a series of blog entries in the near future to discuss how we built it.

Quoted from Jive Talks

I think it is about time we moved beyond the old model of polling and into new, more efficient paradigms. As we come to expect real time, always available tools on the web, we should be thinking about using real time collaboration technologies (like XMPP).

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working

I just finished Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working by Anne Zelenka. Connect is all about web workers, those people who spend all or part of their time working remotely over the web either as telecommuters, freelancers, or some other online working arrangement. When I was at Compiere, I spent about 6 months working remotely, and I could have used a book like this. Based on what I learned from my experience, this book was right on target and offers great advice to people interested in working over the web with good coverage of both the good and the bad aspects. While the flexibility was great for me, you can go a little stir crazy, and Anne has a lot of ideas to help minimize the issues inherent in working from home.

In addition to the basic information about web working, some of the related ideas in the book really helped define some of what I have been noticing over the past couple years that seem to he changing the way people work. Anne makes a great distinction between knowledge work and web work. With knowledge work, the focus has been on the corporation, proprietary technologies, desktop tools, and knowledge, but in contrast, web work is focused on individuals, open technologies, web tools, and relationships. When I was at Intel, the focus was more on knowledge work, but I am noticing that at Jive, the focus is on web work as Anne defines it with collaboration, openness, and relationships being of utmost importance. As an community person, I am definitely more suited to the web work model.

Busy vs. bursty is also a common theme throughout the book. Busy work is based on work hours, email, company relationships, inflexible long-term planning, and web surfing as a time waster, while bursty work is about getting the job done regardless of hours worked, collaboration tools instead of email, relationships that are broader than just your company, agile planning, and web surfing as fuel for ideas. This isn’t to say that you can replace all of the busy work with bursty work; you still need some amount of busy work to get through the tedious, but necessary tasks. However, bursty work also has a place, and again it tends to be more in the style of how we work at Jive and is more suited to my personal style of working.

I will admit to skipping over a couple of sections, like technology recommendations for home work systems, since I have an in depth knowledge of some of these topics based on my recent experiences as a web worker. Even if you aren’t a telecommuter or freelancer working mostly over the web, I still recommend the book and Web Worker Daily, the companion web site. It has a lot of interesting ideas for how work is changing as we move more and more of our lives online.

Want to see me present at Ignite2?

Don’t forget to RSVP for Ignite Portland 2! We have some awesome presentations on the lineup.

I’ll even be doing a presentation on online communities in the style of Dr. Seuss. For example:

Dr. Seuss:

“I’m the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.

NOW…thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ’round.

And my poor Bar-bar-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food in their tummies!”

Dawn’s Translation: Play Nice: Be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members.

Other awesome presentation topics include: robots, rockets, sushi, undercover hookers, biodiesel and more!

Podcast Episode 6: Online Community Management with Stormy Peters

In this podcast, I talked to Stormy Peters, Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic. Prior to Open Logic, Stormy founded and managed the Open Source Program Office at HP. She has addressed the United Nations, European Union and various U.S. state governments on open source software, and she is a co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation. We talked about a variety of topics related to managing successful open source and online communities.

Download:
Online Community Management with Stormy Peters (mp3)

If you are doing something really cool with your online community, please let me know! I am open to suggestions for potential interviews.

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Posts: