Following accusations that I have 'stabbed the baby' on DataPortability.org, I took a listen to the audio from the DataPortability Steering Group telecon from today. It has only confirmed what I thought: DataPortability.org is about as agile as a quadriplegic in a coma. These guys are dead in the water. And before anyone goes crazy, I'm just the messenger.
The podcast describes a process of coming up with a formal governance structure. This involves a Plenary, Action Groups (aka. Standing Committees), Task Forces (aka. Special Committees), a super-complex set of voting rules, a 'sunset provision', a complex set of different statuses (Officers, Participants, Voting Participants, Representatives, organizational representatives and observers) and rules about who is allowed to participate and how. Hilariously, the notes for today's telecon contain the following gem of misplaced wisdom: Don't over-engineer solutions to problems that don't exist, yet. Go forward with simplicity, then correct course as necessary later.
I guess the placement of the comma in the first sentence means that when a problem does exist, it can be completely over-engineered. Okay, cheap shot. If you omit that comma, it's a very good statement of principles. Now, it would be interesting to see what would happen if DataPortability.org adhered to it.
To pre-emptively rebut accusations that I've stabbed the baby: certainly not. The fact is that adding a few extra layers of bureaucracy to a supposed community effort is not going to improve things. The W3C is bureaucratic, but it actually produces some great work in spite of the administration, not because of it. Who wants to deal with that? It's insufferable enough if you are doing it for a living. But if you are volunteering for an online community project? Screw that. I'd look for some grand, conspiratorial vision - but I know it's not there. It's just a bunch of people who think that the best way to get people to collaborate is to create something more like an org chart than like an IRC channel. Mistaken, but not evil. We'll know the poor little baby is completely dead when we see some kind of WS-* or SOAP fluff coming out of DP.
There is a silver lining in this. A lot of people (wrongly) accuse the Semantic Web people of promising and not delivering (which is a bit silly - the SciAm article came out in 2001, and it's getting into industry seven years later - CSS took much longer than that, but nobody complains about that, because such an objection to the SemWeb is a convenient mask for other things). Well, compared to DataPortability.org, the SemWeb people are really freaking agile. (And we can do party tricks like following our own noses around.)
In other news: last night I started work on an initial design for the project I'm working on. It fits on to one Post-It note. I'm hoping that the final spec will not be longer than three A4 pages. If it is longer than that, that means I have not narrowed the problem space sufficiently.
