Data, Data all around

I attended 2gether08 today for the afternoon and walked into a very interesting discussion on making data public. Now following the Free Our Data campaign from the Guardian I've had a keen interest on the subject. Many points were discussed from innovating on this newly available data, to cost savings for doing so through to privacy issues surrounding private data (such as medical records) and data which people seem to give away freely through social sites such as Facebook and finally data which people give away to serve a better experience (think supermarket club card, or Google search).

One of the interesting points raised was about who the public tend to put their trust in, and maybe not so surprisingly, it's not the government. There is a trend that people are giving or putting more data into corporate entities, be they your favoured supermarket, accountant or bank. An interesting point was raised by Paul Downey that although he does online banking, he doesn't have the same trust in Yahoo! to mashup his banking data through Pipes or some other such technology, this is mainly due to banks be regulated authorities.

The conversation moved on and touched upon escrow like accounts for personal data and this got me thinking about identity. As we move towards tools like OpenID and OAuth, the thought occurred to me, would you log into your bank with your OpenID? If your OpenID provider isn't regulated, or even in the same country as you, would you trust it enough with potential access to your online bank? Let me turn that question around a bit now, if you're OpenID provider was a regulated authority, perhaps the bank in question or even some government department - would that change your answer?

The final question left in my mind was, that with a few people thinking about decentralised escrow like data accounts, could you trust people to look after their own data? I know that when I carry my passport with me, I get slightly paranoid. I also know that after losing 2 or 3 hard discs over the last 10 years, I'm not sure I'd want that responsibility. What I do know is that I hate repeating myself, and if government bodies can share data easier between themselves, and if there's a way I can authorise companies to share my data in a way that makes my life easier to lead, I might just buy into that.

I suppose with the level of data that may become available, the responsibility may shift somewhat with who owns, maintains and secures that data.

hReview use for music ratings

After my previous post on various music web sites and they work out for me, PSD left a comment pointing to the microformats site, and more specifically hReview.

What I'd really like to do is be able to traverse my music collection and build up a hReview page of where I've given a rating to songs and albums. What would be cool, would be to then import that into those music sites so my musical tastes are syncronized (and no, not the album by Jamiroquai).

Open Source: consumer vs creator

Talk of "we do open source" or "we need to embrace open source" and lots of other comments at an open source awareness day at work yesterday made me think. What makes an individual, or company "open source" friendly?

I think I may have been guilty of some naivety around consumers of open source. I've heard some people be openly proud of the consumptive use of open source, but is it good enough to only be a consumer?

JP Rangaswami's blog post on 'Build vs Buy vs Opensource' springs to mind. Let's take in a few examples, and yes, they will be simple, as I'm simple minded ;)

Company A has a business problem that needs solving and they download a bunch of open source tools and applications (web servers and the like) and write a bit of custom code and make a custom application that solves that problem. Cool, well done.

Company B has a similar problem, but this time they sell that application as a vendor . OK, that's all well and good they've got costs to cover and if there's a market that's willing to pay then their analysts have done their job.

Now, what if both products from company A and B become common problems in themselves. Do they have a responsibility to open those products up? Perhaps responsibility is the wrong word, there may be circumstances (not red take circumstances that is) that makes this not the case, but do they at least have a moral obligation as a consumer to at least consider opening up?

Perhaps later, company A build a new product completely from scratch. If that becomes a common problem later, do they have any more reason to open source?

I suppose what I'm trying to ask is, is it enough as a creator to be a consumer of open source software to say "I'm open source friendly"?

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Oh, and if you didn't attend, the take away was definitely PSDs poster.