Some friends and acquaintances of mine were at the WebCamp Social Network Portability event in Cork today - Dan, Stephanie, Uldis, Aral, Ben and others. I wanted to go along, but didn't. Instead, I had a nice lie in and watched a live stream on Ustream and asked questions in IRC and got mentioned numerous times during the talks. The Internet lets me be a ghost and inflict myself on an event in Ireland without even leaving my desk.
There are some slides up - danbri's keynote, Uldis' on three-line FOAF files. Steph has put up a video of her talk about social network portability from the perspective of the user. There'll be more up on the wiki, I expect.
In the closing session, I remotely asked this question in the backchannel to the panel: So, do you think that these problems are going to be solved by large groups of people in huge mailing lists and working groups or by smoke-filled rooms filled with hackers more focused on solving problems than coming up with philosophical thought experiments?
I think it's an important question. Personally, I think that any of the approaches to this need to be driven by rough consensus and, more importantly, running, well-tested code working to well-defined and well-tested specifications. Convoluted mailing list discussions or blog posts or conferences should be a sideline, and the more important part is writing the damn code. This is where I tend to part ways with things like the Data Portability Working Group, where the discussions seem to go on endlessly about things like identity, privacy and truth. Now, those topics are interesting and worth talking about, but it's a bit like if your plumbing is leaking and you hire a philosopher, who comes around to your bathroom and tells you that since there is no such thing as truth or the external world and that we should be satisfied with our own subjective realities. Your toilet is blocked up, the bath is leaking and the shower burns your skin off. Perhaps you need a plumber, not a philosopher.
We've got FOAF, SIOC, SPARQL, hCard, XFN, OAuth and OpenID. Let's sit down and implement the damn things rather than pontificate on a mailing list about the nature of identity. If it doesn't work, or there are legal or privacy concerns, we fix them as they come up. That is what I was getting at in my question. The Data Portability group will be successful in my mind when it's stopped talking to itself and started writing user stories, test cases and code. If it doesn't start doing that, then the criticism that it's just a group for vendors to join to make themselves seem like they are doing something vaguely open is justified.
