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 At the ID Workshop leading into the RSA Conference, we announced the impending formation of the Kantara Initiative. To those following the Identity Community, this wasn’t really ground-breaking news as we’ve been working on this for the past year or so (under various monikers). What was worth mentioning in the workshop, however, was that we’d signed a number of founding member organizations (including the Information Card Foundation, Internet Society, DataPortability Project, XDI.org, Project Concordia) and put out a call for more to join before the launch in a few months. Oh, and we settled on the name.
After much (much) debate, the founders settled on the name Kantara as it is a Swahili word for “bridge” and has Arabic roots meaning “harmony”. And yes, we know that some people believe it should be spelled “Qantara” (while others want to add a trailing “h” on the end, too). In the end, there was strong support for the name as it blends key points of the group’s mission to:
Foster identity community harmonization, interoperability, innovation, and broad adoption through the development of open identity specifications, operational frameworks, education programs, deployment and usage best practices for privacy-respecting, secure access to online services.
Beyond the announcement itself, the bridge-building we hope to facilitate already struck a positive chord throughout the RSA Conference. Of the meetings I attended, here are a list of them where Kantara was mentioned (either by the presenters or in audience questions):
- Fostering Collaboration and Opportunities in Identity Management
- Federate Access Policy, Not Identity
- Building Authorization into the Enterprise Identity System
- Cloud Computing and Identity Challenges
- Identity Management for the Cloud: Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices
- Identity and Privacy Models
In each case, the comments were positive and hopeful. Like opening a new birthday present, the IdM professionals were excited to play with the new group. Our goal, of course, is to make sure the Kantara Initiative lives up to our collectively high expectations. Taking a page out of the Concordia playbook, the initiative will provide neutral ground for all participants. There is no cost for participation, and all contributors are welcome. The playing field is level, and we’re excited to see what projects take advantage of the unique opportunity to have a truly open dialog.
 The Tweet Race: As you can tell from the photo to the right, Eve Maler (a.k.a. @xmlgrrl) was apparently happy that her Kantara announcement Tweet beat mine. I’m relatively convinced, however, that she cheated by typing her’s in advance (only needing to hit “send” from the stage), while I had to type mine on the spot. In fact, her announcement blog post also won. Hmmph.
We talk to Paul Madsen, a member of the Technology Expert Group in Liberty Alliance in this episode of DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast. Through the conversation, he dives into SAML and how the Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) and related specifications fit into a comprehensive identity solution stack. In response to the question about implementation difficulty, he points to the work underway by OpenLiberty.org developing a set of deployable ID-WSF libraries. Another project that helps bridge between specifications is Project Concordia.
Leading the episode, we quickly touch on the following bits of news:
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Episode 13: Listen Episode Length: 00:31:38
Episode 12 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast welcomes Steve back to the fold. In this episode we talk to Drummond Reed (a.k.a. =Drummond), a valued participant across the identity and data portability space. Drummond is most well known as one of the pioneers of the XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) and XDI (XRI Data Interchange) open standards at OASIS where he co-chairs the XDI and XRI Technical Committees.
During the discussion, Drummond identified two key areas needing solutions within the scope of data portability: common definitions and portable authorization. XDI and link contracts solve these problems.
In the context of data portability, ever since I first heard the term when wearing my XDI TC hat, I said, “That’s like the mission statement for the XDI Technical Committee in two words. Why didn’t we just say it’s data portability.” If there’s one headline feature of XDI, it’s data portability. XDI is a protocol for sharing data, just like HTTP is a protocol for sharing content.
Of note, history was in the making during the discussion. While hunting for an appropriate analogy describing the underlying description model, Steve hit upon using the periodic table of elements. Look for Drummond using it in his next series of talks.
Leading the episode, we quickly touch on the following bits of news:
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Episode 12: Listen Episode Length: 00:52:59
After a brief hiatus last week as Trent and Steve were otherwise indisposed, the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast is back at half strength. Steve is still MIA, but joining Trent in the virtual studio is Bob Ngu, Founder of Jiggyme.com, a video aggregation startup that is beginning to focus specifically on technology videos.
Bob has been an active contributor to the DataPortability Project since March, and was highlighted in the project’s May report. The spotlight was shined on his DataPortability: In the Wild blog series. In this series, Bob outlines his discussions with various people involved with data portability. Among the areas he’s covered so far include:
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Episode 11: Listen Episode Length: 00:17:34
In this very special episode of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast, Trent’s brother R. Mark Adams joins the data portability discussion. He is a genetic engineer who earned his Ph.D. in cell biology and was a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. He is currently a Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton and runs their bioinformatics group. Of specific interest related to data portability is his work for the open CaBIG (Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) project, a National Cancer Institute initiative to link cancer researchers and their data.
Up until now, we have focused primarily on the use cases around existing social networking websites. There is, however, a wealth of knowledge and experience to be tapped within other fields. Mark has worked for over 15 years designing and building large-scale informatics systems. Further, his extensive experience within the standards and open source communities place him in a unique position to provide valuable insight into issues being explored by the DataPortability Project.
During the conversation, Mark offered up some cautionary comments regarding the process of defining standards:
There’s a tendency on the part of industry, broadly, to try to skip to a technology stack as a means of adopting standards quickly.
One has to be careful in how one creates standards. This is why I say trying to divorce standards as cleanly as possible from their underlying technology implementations is important to do. The reason being it allows you to determine standards that can be widely adopted and used without the complexity or the risk of lock-in.
Rounding out the discussion was a call to action on both sides. Mark is reaching out to the DataPortability Project to become more involved in the bioinformatics field, and suggests we solicit participation from within their ranks.
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Episode 10: Listen Episode Length: 00:49:28
We are joined by Robert Scoble in episode 9 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast. Currently the Managing Director of FastCompany.tv, he is a well-known and respected technology pundit who got his start blogging at UserLand. He is well known as an early advocate of the DataPortability Project when he tried to download his social data from Facebook.
The show is kicked off with a discussion about his recent speculation that Microsoft could buy Facebook and keep it closed. Scoble talks about the services and tools like FriendFeed that offer alternate news streams to counter the Facebook hegemony. The discussion also flowed around automated behavior tracking, advertizing, and the interplay between control/privacy within various portable data models.
Of particular interest is Scoble’s view of the inevitability of an open flow of user data:
Openness does win in the end. It will just take a little bit of time to get there. We’ll see a lot of new stuff come along to make it easier for users to open these systems up.
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Episode 9: Listen Episode Length: 00:26:30
In episode 8 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast we diverge from the standard format to dive beyond the headlines to explore recent news. We spent the time talking in depth about the Comcast acquisition of Plaxo and Google’s release of Friend Connect.
For Plaxo, we have Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect, and John McCrae, VP Marketing, talking about the acquisition and how it furthers data portability. Specifically, Smarr made it clear that the name of the game in portability is not making everything homogeneous, but rather opening up the flow of communication across systems:
Data portability is about empowering users to connect the tools they use so they don’t have to repeat themselves over and over again. So that the information can flow for others to discover it. It would be a mistake to characterize it as making everything exactly the same.
On the same thread, returning guest Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for Google’s OpenSocial project, highlights their commitment to the openness of data portability:
One company can’t hold anything hostage because we’re connecting together open standards. All these pieces can be supplied by multiple parties. You can interoperate without having to have a business negotiation because you can write to the standard and the standard works.
In the discussion, Marks also corrects some common misconceptions around Google’s Friend Connect. Some of the reporting about it mistakenly assumed that Google would be siphoning off the friendship graph when using it’s system to connect sites. He clarifies that Friend Connect enables the portability of user data by mapping the connections, and isn’t storing the data itself.
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Episode 8: Listen Episode Length: 00:35:41
We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.
We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.
The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.
Danny regularly posts on the following sites:
Also mentioned in the episode:
BONUS: We bring back Danny Ayer’s “Get Your Data Out” DataPortability Project anthem to close out the episode.
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Episode 7: Listen Episode Length: 0:45:47
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April 24th, 2009 | 
Freeing Locked-up User Data
Chris Saad recently posted a succinct clarification of the following questions related to some business issues around data portability:
He’s got some helpful diagrams that illustrate his point, so I suggest reading his post on “The mythical value of data lockin“. In short, though, it’s this paragraph that seems to sum it up:
I wish I could remember where I first heard this quote to attribute the source, but it works as the bumper sticker (or Twitter) version of the same sentiment:
Basically, sites will ultimately learn much more about their users=customers when they plug into the sharing network than they’ll be giving up. Here at matchmine, of course, we’re all about enabling sites to access user interests and tastes (under the control of the user), so we bounce into these questions (and provide the same answers) on a daily basis.
To this point, we’re walking the data portability walk ourselves. We’re not only consuming feeds from various sources, but are also a couple days away from streaming data back out, too. It’s all part of our Openness Roadmap I hope to start talking up in the coming weeks.
In the end, all of us (e.g. users, service providers, destination sites, publishers, etc.) win when we aren’t wasting time constantly reinventing wheels (or filling out yet another form). Instead, we can use that time to focus on the unique values we bring to the collective table.