Blank (Media) Slate

I recently I had a chance to chat with Joe Andrieu about his work chairing the standards committee for the VRM Project. During that discussion, we talked a lot about where VRM is in their development process as an organization, and it was interesting to see the similarity to where we are with the DataPortability Project.

Following along that conversation, Joe recently posted about VRM where he mentioned DataPortability:

As an example, the Dataportability movement has framed the problem in terms of Data and Portability. This brings to mind exporting and importing “my” data from vendor to vendor. That’s a start toward liberating users from vendor silos. However, I think the real win is in user-centric services, where the location of the “data” is essentially irrelevant–even as it is hosted under the control of the user–and all user-authorized vendors can access the data through approved services.

This, in my mind, is fallout of a misnomer buried in the phrase “data portability”, and by extension in the name of the group. I’ve attended (in person or virtually) a lot of DataPortability Project events, and this discussion comes up a lot. It basically goes something like this:

• Alice: “I think the DataPortability Project is too focused on download and upload of my data.”
• Bob: “Yeah, sometimes I don’t want to move my data around, I just want my accounts to access my data from each other.”
• Chris: “Of course, that’s always been implicit in the plan. That’s why the domain name DataAccessibility.org is a redirect to DataPortability.org.”
• David: “If that’s true… then we need to do a better job articulating this connection to the community.”

… and that’s just about where the conversation ends each time. Apparently, we’re still not doing a good job explaining ourselves.

In short, there’s no expectation that the frameworks, standards, etc. being evaluated will require “physical movement” of data between systems. We fully assume that the data need only be accessible across systems.

Basically, I think the term “Data Portability” simply caught on (along with the mistaken understandings) as it flows better than “Data Accessibility”. So we just need to work that much harder to spread the word.