[Social-discuss] Personal DATA STORES/USER DATA BANKS

[Kaliya]

A cluster of folks are working on the development of personal data stores (user data banks)

Paul Trevithick who has been actively building Open Source Libraries and Tools in this ecology for years. Most of it is in the Higgins Project under the Eclipse umbrella. 

He recently wrote this post about what is emerging interims of a model for USER-owned/controlled/managed personal data/information   including friending data, preferences etc.  All the stuff you have on a social network today.

Creating the ability to do peer-to-peer friending (outside of any commercial silo like facebook, mySpace, Twitter). 

Creating the ability for people to have a relationship with the vendors they do business with that they would like to share information with (this is the VRM concept - vendor relationship management as a corollary to customer relationship management)

Creating the ability for people to have relationships - connections to the organizations and groups of people they want to connect to.  This could be "formal nonprofits" or just a local group of knitters. 

http://www.incontextblog.com/?p=504

To make this vision a success there needs to be tools and libraries and pluggin's for all the major open source social platforms.   

I just found out about this list and trying to find out as much as possible about what you are up to.  I would really like to see how to bridge between the emerging efforts that are thinking along these lines. 

To me this is not about one kind of player winning or dominating but a diversity of interests coming together and making sure that the end-user/person is in the center of what is built and their interests are protected - made center. 

-Kaliya