Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

If you’re not so connected either to the “twitterverse” or the web industry, you probably haven’t heard a lot about the buzz that is currently happening around the issue of data portability, and the dataportability.org organization and effort. I figured, since I’ve been getting a bit involved in the community, I’d give a bit of a summary of what’s going on, and what will possibly come from this effort.

Dataportability.org - the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others.

So first, what is data portability? Basically, it means that the data that you put into social networking sites, like profiles, social graph (those who you are connected to,) media, etc. are *yours* to do whatever you want with. In addition, they are portable - you can move your data from place to place. And you have control over who can see what. There is a good blog article, which, in some regards, might be seen as a criticism of the dataportability.org group, but which, to my mind, actually defines quite well what I’ve thought data portability means.  He talks about data “accessibility”, “visibility”, “removal” and “ownership” - all things that, to my mind, are components of data portability.

I’m involved in the evangelism action group. So, I’m evangelizing. I’ll be doing an entry soon, sort of “how social networks could use open standards 101.” I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 tools, they need to understand the implications of what they do, and demand that the tools use open standards.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Open Standards, Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.