SocialWeb at Web 2.0 Expo

What has been happening with Data Portability on the Social Web. ie. OpenID, OAuth, etc.

The workshop is being run by @chrismessina, @daveman692 and @jsmarr

I will twitter comments from this session using the tag #w2e_sw

If you want to build new and innovative services you don't want to frustrate your users by asking for a bunch of account related data. If the data is out there go and get it. Don't Re-Key!

You need standards to enable mashups. Alternatively, you need consistent formats.

If standards exist - use them!

http://www.oxyweb.co.uk/blog produced a world map of popular social networks. This struck me as a great parallel to the HealthCare world with incompatible/competing health care players.

Functional sites, like Friendfeed, Twitter, last.fm and Dopplr represent specialist services. They have the opportunity to create combined value but they need a social graph to create this.

Facebook solved this for many, as long as developers were prepared to live inside facebook.

Activity streams are an emerging standard. No logo yet.

XMPP is not that popular yet, although it is one of the pipes that Twitter implemented and search.twitter.com leveraged.

Partuza is an Open Social - social Network site that uses Apache Shindig.

Pinax is a platform for rapidly developing websites using social tools such as IM, chat,

The emerging theme is "Connect"

Facebook Connect, OpenSocial Connect.

New building blocks:

• Who you are
• Who you know
• What's going on

These are aspects of the social ecosystem. These create the virtual circle of sharing/knowing.

The anatomy of "Connect":

• Profile (id, accounts profiles)
• Relationships (friends, followers)
• Content
• Activity
• Goal (search and discovery)

Most sites are building on the Open Stack:

• MySpace
• Yahoo
• Google
• Plaxo
• Microsoft

Supporting:

• OpenID
• XRDS-Simple
• OAuth
• PortableContacts
• OpenSocial

Facebook is different but is matching these standards.

Why do this?:

- Why do people have to:

• Create a new account on every service
• Re-create their profile
• Give away their password to every site that asks
• Re-discover their friends
• re-friend their friends
• Learn new ways to share and communicate

Why do developers have to?:

• Deal with forgotten passwords
• create another profile form
• Support every new service API that emerges
• Force members to invite everyone they know
• Implement and unsafe method to import contacts
• Create widgets for incompatible social networks
• Manually interpret feeds for activity streams

Industry trends:

• User control of data
• User centric web services
• Locatin based services
• Real time content delivery ubiquitous connectivity
• Interoperable app platforms
• content aggregation and syndication
• increasing quantities of data to work with
• democratization of digital media creation tools

How do customers benefit:

MySpace has built login with OpenID and OAuth to compete with Facebook Connect.

OpenID popup extension is being developed to simplify the user interface, ala facebook connect.

The emerging issue is that once an item has been made "public" on a social network it can't be withdrawn. If you withdraw an item it may still exist in other places that were connected to the original publishing location.

Demos:

• Eventbox

Now for the technical stuff:

OpenID Demo:

Mapquest (owned by AOL). You can sign in to mapquest with OpenID.

In 2009 there are over 30,000 sites that let you login with OpenID (Relying sites). Growth from 20,000 in August 2008 and 10,000 in Jan 2008. (source: http://blog.janrain.com)

Implementing OpenID as a relying party (ie. accept OpenID)

Internally you need to map one or more openIDs to an internal account.

The OpenID User experience

Directed Identity is emerging as one solution to avoid need for users to know URLs.

At least there aren't too many major providers so the button option is still feasible.

Once people have become known to a site it is possible to tailor re-sign in based upon where a user has come from. eg. If they arrive from Gmail then assume a gmail account.

Personal Discovery standard is emerging, driven by EU demands.

The browser knows who you are so this may be a way to simplify login. This moves away from web sites trying to guess which accounts you use.

The Popup extension is emerging as a technique. The challenge is to avoid spoofing. People don't look at the URL bar.

Remember - you can use email address as an indicator of which OpenId providers to support.

Different sites have different account preferences. This leads to sites supporting multiple standards. eg. OpenID + facebook. At least supporting OpenId means you automatically support Yahoo, AOL, Google, MySpace and other popular sites.

Microformats are also important.

Microformats enable webpages to be an API.

Semantic information can be embedded in a page. Some of the oldest standards are hCard (vCard in HTML)

Use CSS classes to markup and style the data. Very simple way to markup information in existing web pages.

This is ideal for database driven sites because you can edit one output web page and apply a microformat to every database record that is displayed through that web page.

Twitter supports hCard and includes the rel=me setting. If you want your blog to be the top search result on your name in Google then add this value to your blog. Simply add rel="me" to a relevant link on your blog.

Discovery

The more you publish the more you need a way to identify what you are publishing as yours. Our desktop is moving out in to the cloud.

Identity enables discovery. XRDS-Simple "the name is more complex than the concept"

XRDS - defines services.

eg. OpenID, PortableContacts

eg. OpenID points to one service. PortableContacts points to Plaxo.

WordPress OpenID plugin supports creating XRDS file.

XRDS-Simple can be used for a personal discovery or for sites to publish their service endpoints

LRDD - Link-based Resource Descriptor Discovery (emerging work)

Authorization

Authorization is important so you don't have to make data public to make it portable.

Will OAuth work in a mobile mode? Yes!

iPhone example is FlightTrack Pro works with Tripit. The iPhone app uses OAuth and Safari to authorize the app on Tripit.com.

OAuth is a protocol for developing password-less APIs.

Plaxo was recently bought by Comcast. Comcast saw a 92% success rate with login using OpenID in collaboration with Google.

The Plaxo-Google connection uses a hybrid. They do the OpenID dance and also handle the OAuth token acquisition at the same time. They also collect and notify user on the basic information that will be used. eg. name and email address.

The Comcast-Google test worked so well that the business folks at Comcast wouldn't let them turn the experiment off!

OAuth can be used asynchronously to allow one user to give permission to someone else to gain access to their information. eg. Dave allows Chris to see his phone number in his contact record.

Relationships and Contacts

Rather than have to support writing to address book APIs for each major service they instead implement a standard protocol. That is PortableContacts. This builds on OAuth and vCard standards.

GMail now supports Portable Contacts. ie. No Google specific code is required to use information from the Google Addressbook.

OpenSocial REST People Protocol is now PortableContact compatible.

vCardDav compatibility is coming with IETF.

Linking Accounts

The XFN Microformat is being used to link accounts and services.

Add a Rel=Me link to connect pages on services..

You can also use Rel=Contact to identify friends.

Google's Social Graph API does this in a simple form. A demo is available.

Activity Streams

Activity Streams are in the realm of "LifeStreaming"

Friendfeed support approximately 59 services. Each was hand coded by Friendfeed.

Activity Streams is about creating a protocol that can be leveraged across sites.

Social Discovery. eg. Plaxo Pulse, LinkedIn network updates, Facebook status updates.

Messaging: Twitter, Yammer, Eventbox (desktop app)

Brand/Personal Monitoring: GetSatisfaction's Overheard searching Twitter.

Primitives: Active, Verb, Object

Actor, Verb Object (context)

Build on Standards

Use ATOM for lists. (aka feeds)

Activity Stream is using a derivation of ATOM to share streams.

Activity Streams is targeted to go in to OpenSocial.

Check out http://activitystrea.ms for the latest info.

Gadgets and OpenSocial

Allow applications to be added tomultiple sites. Write a gadget once and allow in to run on multiple sites. Over 700M users acorss multiple sites support OpenSocial from Myspace to Plaxo to Ning oor Orkut etc.

Shindig is an Apache incubator project for gadgets in OpenSocial.

You can also build OpenSocial apps in the Google AppEngine.

This standard simplifies Engineering integratin and allows developers to focus on PRODUCT integration - ie. How to fit in to the target environment. eg. Ning is different from MySpace.

Next Steps - Homework:

1. Markup existing Data

2. Stop leaking passwords

3. Support OpenID and OAuth

These tools are mature enough to enable simple integration across sites and business partners.

Check out theSocialWeb.tv for the latest news in the space.

The Health Session at Social Media Club DC is a sell out

Tomorrow, Wednesday February 7th, IQ Solutions in Rockville is hosting a Social Media Club session. The topic is "Engaging the Health World Through Social Media." I have been asked to take part on the panel that is being moderated by Alexandra Rampy (@SocialButterfly). It is a real pleasure to be participating alongside Healthcare blogger, Dr. Val Jones (@DrVal), Christian Olsen and Joel Selzer of Ozmosis.

This should be a great panel, an interactive discussion, with not a PowerPoint in sight.

I have been invited because of my role as "chief troublemaker" and change agent in the HealthCamp movement. With HealthCampDc happening on Friday February 27th and HealthCampPhila taking place a month later on Saturday March 28th, this is a great opportunity to spread the word about these events.

I hope that anyone following the event is inspired to sign up for a HealthCamp event and join in the discussion about the future of Healthcare.

For those not familiar with HealthCamp, these are barcamp-style events focused around HealthCare. Healthcare is a complex industry with many different specialists engaged in the delivery of services.

Privacy issues create complexity and often stifles innovation and experimentation in the industry. Privacy is a double-edged sword. We have to trust that our privacy will be protected. At the same time, if we happen to be the victim of serious medical conditions that affect our quality of life then sites like PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that we are willing to sacrifice some of our privacy in order to improve our quality of life.

Privacy issues will come to the fore with Personal Health Records. Fears of our most personal information being accessible without our consent will have to be balanced against the risk of receiving incompatible treatments due to an ignorance of the full range of medications we are taking.

It always strikes me as ironic that when it comes to Health Records it is us, the health consumer, that are the only people in the health equation that typically does not have access to our records.

As I have discussed in an earlier post I believe Personal Health Records will be adopted by the senior members of the population. This will be driven by the quality of life issue. Our seniors will take advantage of Remote Tele Health monitoring equipment that will feed the Personal Health Record and allow vital signs to be remotely monitored.   

How does Social Media come in to play in the Health Arena?

I expect to see Social network tools being adopted amongst doctors and others with common interests. However, the real revolution has to come with the Personal Health Record.

We are the one common denominator in the health delivery equation. As such, we need to encourage systems to be developed that reflect this fact. If this is to happen then the Health Care industry needs to recognize and adopt some of the standards that are enabling information to be controlled by individuals. OpenID, OAuth and microformats are just three examples of standards that have much to offer in the Health Care arena.

I look forward to discussing these issues at the February Social Media Club DC meeting. If you come to the event please come and say hello!

BarCampPhilly - an amazing vibe

I spent today at BarCamp Philly. You can check out the day through a number of routes. Try barcamphilly.org as the main site. Also do a search on twitter for the #bcphilly tag. The schedules are there on the barcamphilly.org site. The iphone app to track the schedule worked really well. Great work team! Is that software available for use at other events?

Roz (aka Stellargirl) and JPToto and others did a great job to organize a fantastic day at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

I ended up presenting a session on Data Portability in Health Care. The focus was on how to get consumer engagement. Let's drive a push for adoption of OpenID, OAuth and microformats from the consumer perspective. He have to take our health in to our own hands. There seems to be an increasing recognition that we need to address single sign-on and data portability in healthcare.

I talked with a number of great people like Mary Ann Geier and Phil Baumann. All are interested in Health Care issues. I know I have missed other names. If I did, please leave a comment below and register your interest on the subject of Health. The bottom line is that there is a real interest in launching a HealthCampPhilly. The HealthCamp movement is growing like crazy. We have HealthCampUK happening this coming Monday (November 10th). We have HealthCampMd, to be held at Stevenson University (formerly Villa Julie College) in January. HealthCampDc set for February at CareFirst in Washington DC. HealthCampWv courtesy of Bob Coffield happening in March 2009 in Charleston, WV. Last week HealthCampNash also got proposed for Spring 2009 in Nashville, TN. I am also looking at hosting a HealthCampBoston on April 24th, 2009 - alongside the Health 2.0 conference.

The momentum that is growing around HealthCamp just reflects the consumer dissatisfaction with the current state of HealthCare and the recognition that we, the consumer, can make a difference if we demand change.

At BarCampPhilly I also gave a couple of sessions on the use of JackBe's Presto platform. This is a mature Enterprise Mashup Platform that recently revamped it's development licensing. They now offer free perpetual development licenses. This is a great move to stimulate the developer community. The feedback I got on the platform was overwhelmingly positive. I would really like to see the JackBe platform at the Boston Health 2.0 conference providing demonstrations of how their platform can integrate information across disparate Health care sites. I definitely need to work on this as an idea.

A Mini HealthCampPA - Engaging consumers in HealthCare, DataPortability and all that

The discussion on HealthCamp related issues such as DataPortability was very stimulating. It took place at 11:00am in Room 1215. The issue was how we, as consumer, can drive the re-construction of the HealthCare system in a way that finally gives us access to the information about us - Our Personal Health Record.

Once again, just like last week at SocialDevCampEast, a good audience of highly engaged people participated. One of the most telling quotes came from one of the participants, geoff dimasi :

"I didn't realize I had so much to say on the subject [of healthcare]"

I need to reflect on those discussions but hope some of the attendees will add their comments to this blog. More later.

Promoting HealthCamp and DataPortability at SocialDevCampEast

This afternoon I led a session on DataPortability as it relates to HealthCare. The topic is expected to range over OpenId, OAuth, Microformats and other related projects.

This turned out to be a very lively discussion. PRivacy is a major concern but the idea is that there are a lot of developer eyeballs focused on standards like OpenID and OAuth that will address problems more quickly than with proprietary solutions.

This discussion will continue at the next HealthCamp.

HealthCampSf - more fascinating discussion and planning

A big thanks needs to go out to Manatt Health Solutions for providing the venue for HealthCampSf at the Manatt, Phelps and Phillips offices in the Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. The only downside to this venue is the distraction that the view from their 30th floor offices brings. The views over the bay are totally stunning! Check out my blog from the Health 2.0 Accelerator meeting that was held there earlier this week.

Happening the day after the high octane Heath 2.0 Conference, where even Dr. Ruth made an appearance, The event saw the effects of the party hangover.

HealthCamp took place both physically and virtually with people dialing in from across the country.

THe discussions ranged over a number of subjects.

• How to evolve the Health 2.0 Accelerator and the Health 2.0 Conference
• How to promote interoperability initiatives with the Health 2.0 Accelerator

During HealthCampSf the CEO and VP of Business Development from JanRain courtesy of an invitatin from Mike Kirkwood of Polka.com, joined in the sessions and presented the latest developments around OpenId. JanRain's OpenId tools have recently been adopted by Microsoft for use with HealthVault. JanRain have released a Software as a Service offering for OpenId and OAuth, RPX Plus and RPX Pro.

The objective of these products is to bring implementation of OpenId and OAuth down to a less than one day integration exercise.

This is great news. OpenId has over 500 million OpenID capable accounts globally and anything that simplifies the signup process, without sacrificing security is a positive move.

Some of the discussion that spun out of this OpenId and OAuth overview touched on creating an Health Information Interoperability Demonstrator. It was suggested that this could be run in conjunction with the Health 2.0 Conference.

The concept is to plan to bring together developers in the Health 2.0 space and over the course of one or two days to work together to create new health-centric mashups as demonstrators.

One of the things that came through in the Health 2.0 Conference is that the industry has moved on beyond simple health content aggregation and is now focusing on getting real work done and transactions processed. This is great progress, but it just served to drive home the realization that there is much more to be done and the real evolution is when these different applications, platforms and services can be connected together to create new services that can extend the reach and value of these Health 2.0 applications.

For example, how might PharmaSURVEYOR's drug interaction software be integrated with Intelecare's Medical Adherence platform to improve drug safety for patients.

The discussion with JanRain was invaluable. It demonstrated that OpenId and OAuth continue to evolve and provides practical single sign-on capabilities and secure information sharing mechanisms.

After the discussion I was even more convinced that the Health 2.0 Accelerator should leverage the work being done by DataPortability.org. Part of the role of the Health 2.0 Accelerator could be to act as a Health Industry Special Interest Group to promote Health Information interoperability.

Health Care is poised to go through massive transformation. It will increasingly become a consumer-driven industry. As that happens it is entirely logical that the industry should build upon and leverage the developments that are continuing at breakneck pace in the Social Networking world. Emerging standards such as Portable Contacts will grow to become underlying standards in healthcare. We do not need to re-invent the wheel.

Another area to leverage will be Microformats. These machine interpretable but human readable formats keep evolving. The Health 2.0 software sector needs to look at developing Health related formats to complement xisting formats such as Address cards (hCard), Calendars (hCalendar) and ratings (hReview).

Check out the wetpaint wiki site To find out more about HealthCamp. To find out about future events check out the BarCamp.org front page or the HealthCamp specific page.

Accelerating Health 2.0

There are about 24 people physically in the conference room at Manatt Health Solutions in San Francisco. There is also a conference line with people listening to the session.

Health Care is not a free market.

The employer holds the purse strings.

Consumers need to be engaged where the dollars flow from which is invariably the employer. Google and Microsoft have recognized this in just the last two months.

What do we need to change: Control.

If we achieve one change it is the realization that we need to let go and not worry about controlling all aspects of the relationship with the consumer.

At the center we need to focus on Infrastructure, Information and Incentives.

What are we accelerating towards?

The concepts I have been promoting at HealthCamp (such as HealthCampSf this coming Friday October 24th) We need to leverage standards initiatives that are evolving in the Social Networking space. We need to do this because that is where the consumer, the person at the center of the challenge, is to be found.

Some examples of current projects:

PharmaSurveyor and DestinationRx explained by Erick Von Schweber of PharmaSURVEYOR.

PharmaSurveyor is focused on Drug interactions. DestinationRx is concerned with cost effective sourcing of prescription drugs. Initial collaboration and interoperability has now extended to Mike Kirkwod's Polka DOT com and Barry Appelman's Doublecheckmd. The interoperability is using a drug list XML (CCR) on a peer-to-peer basis.

This is the same format that CVS uses. They issue 10-20,000 records per day. Google can consume this same format in Google Health.

Kryptiq can grab CCR clinical information record from Sage Software's Health Care software and post it to Microsoft's HealthVault.

Private Access has a workflow tool that can reach out to the patient and get preferences around how the patient want's data to be used. This for example allows patients to choose if they want to be discovered for recruitment in clinical trials.

Health 2.0 Accelerator is focused around consumer centric solutions. Helping consumers Co-Manage their care.

Should the accelerator focus on how to define and share clinical data. Does this mean we should apply microformats to health data to enable sharing?

I think there is mileage in the Health 2.0 Accelerator taking a role as a Health focused extension of the DataPortability.org initiative.

Blog Action Day - Poverty and Health Care

Today (October 15th) is Blog Action Day. This year the issue that is front and center is Poverty. With working for a major US Health Care provider my thoughts turned to the issue of how to bring Health and Wellness to those that can't afford traditional health care plans.

Making Health Care accessible to those that need it will be a major challenge that we will have to work together to solve in the USA.

The Health Care system is broken and we have to work out how to put it back together in a way that helps us address this and other significant challenges.

The transformation of Health Care through Social Media, Open Standards and Web 2.0 technologies is the central theme of the series of HealthCamp unconferences I have been organizing. If you will be at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week then look me up, I am helping the organizers there.

After the Conference I will be organizing a HealthCampSf event to take place on Friday October 24th. The venue is still being finalized but I am hoping to hold the event at the Courtyard Marriott San Francisco on 2nd street. The finalized details will be posted on the barcamp.org site.

I will also be attending the second SocialDevCampEast event on Saturday November 1st in Baltimore. The event is filling up fast and I plan to raise the Health Care issue as part of the Social Media conversation at that event. If you plan to be there drop me a line on twitter to ekivemark.

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This post is part of Blog Action Day 08 - Poverty

Geeking out at Web 2.0 Expo

I ducked out of the Finance 2.0 for Early Adopters session and dropped in on the Comet session.

Web Sockets in the HTML 5 specification supports bi-directional communication over a single socket.

With the HTML versin 5 spec the HTTP protocol can upgrade to WebSocket protocol enabling bi-directional flow between client and server over a single socket. This means it traverses firewalls easily and it eliminates the need for middleware components.

This was really just the warm up for me. The session I really wanted to see was Joseph Smarr, the Chief Platform Architect from Plaxo. He makes complex subjects clear and somehow manages to do that while talking at a rate of hundreds of words per minute. His talk is one of the last at the conference and addresses implementing the Open Web.

Joseph is going to talk about OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, PortableContacts and probably more. Plaxo has been on the forefront of the OpenWeb and portability of information, particularly address book information across the web. Their technology was attractive enough for them to be acquired by Comcast earlier this year for a rumored $150-170M. This talk will probably be similar to the one given to Google Developers back in May 2008.

This is a fast moving development space so it will be interesting to see how things have evolved since the first talk in April 2008 at the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco.

Off we go......

"The Web is going social"

OpenI, Oauth, OpenSocial, Microformats.... Jabber is the forgotten standard that is a critical glue component around XMPP. Yes, the stream that Twitter keeps controlling.

"The Social Web of today is broken"

Each web site assumes they are the first to ever be social. Yet another silo gets created. Or they give up and become a widget inside Facebook.

Help is on the way....

New building blocks:

- Who I am

- Who I know

- What's going on

Who I am

Create a portable, durable online identity. On the web we pretend we have never met before. But that is changing.

OpenID

- Sign up with an existing account

- Link and share your profile data between sites.

This is a powerful building block. You can build a trusted connection that allows you to share information between the sites.

AOL, Yahoo and soon MySpace are OpenID providers. Google also does this for some of their properties.

You can consolidate your identity though microformats using

rel=me(XFN)

Only I can put a me link on my web pages.

Most sites that ask for your home url and they add rel=me links. This allows the Social Graph to be trawled.

The advantage for site owners is that you don't need to get members to upload photo, videos and other content. Yet it can still be available to you.

This is an open standard so you can build this content on your own web sites.

Build and maintain real relationships

Contact APIs

- Find people from your current address book

- leverage previously established relationships.

Web mail address books have been the best source of information up to now.

Google, Yahoo and others have implemented these contact apis so you don't need to reveal your userid and password.

OAuth

- Share private data between trusted sites.

This has been a big success in the last year. It is a standard way of granting access to another site.

The big advantage is that you can apply a scope to the access. It could limit the type of operations that are possible or the duration for which it is available.

Friends-List Portability

OAuth allows updating of your friends list. ie. Continuous discovery.

What's going on?

OpenSocial

- Build social apps that can run anywhere.

RSS/Atom

- Syndicate your activity to share with others

- A general mechanism to share updates. Couple with OAuth to limit access via a protected channel.

Jabber (XMPP)

- Real time update stream between sites.

This is an inherently federated protocol. It is a core part of Identi.ca and laconi.ca

GNIP is a middleware provider that is making this easy for service providers.

How is this evolving?

- Emerging Identity Providers. The big portals are adopting these standards to retain users.

- Content Aggregators. As the number of site grow then a middleman acting as a discovery engine will be useful.

- Social Graph Providers. Leveraging friends lists.

XRDS-Simple - A simple service directory document.

PortableContacts

This is a simple standard, similar to vCard and built on OpenSocial that enables the discovery of contact information. OpenSocial will integrate PortableContacts.

The Emerging Scenario is

OpenID to sign in.

Looks for X-XRDS-Location

XRDS-Simple to discover availablew APIs

WWW-Authenticate specifies OAuth

OAuth Discovery via XRDS provides OAuth endpoints.

After OAuth grants access users get a token that enables access.

This provides an end-to-end process for reaching a site and accessing contact information without requiring custom code to be developed for each site.

We are moving towards Write Once and Work.

While providers use different terms they support the same handshake:

- Facebook connect

- Myspace dataavailablity

- Yahoo Y!OS

- Google FriendConnect

- Plaxo Pulse

Facebook is the outlier - the only one not using standards. However they conceptualize the same way and could at somepoint swap out standards "under the hood."

Developers are advised to use the open stack. Once implemented it will be easy to adopt the same handshake process with Facebook.

Brady Forrest asked a great question: Usability with OpenID is an issue that "freaks out Grandmas"

The good point is that because the big players are using open standards the work they are now focusing on to improve usability will feed back in to the Open stack. Some good work is going on how to explain the process to users.

.

VRM and the Personal Address Manager

This VRM Workshop session covered the concept of the Personal Address Manager.

The scene setting points covered:

• First Assumption - Privacy
• Differences from long running relationships
• - Mutual policy negotiation - pain-free
• - Default policy bucket
• - No identifier
• Easy to produce end of relationship artifacts
• Win-Win for customers and vendors
• - Removing barriers to exit is attractive.

A use case was examined: Single Stop Online Shopping

• With Address
• With Personal Delivery Service (eg. relationship wth UPS, Fedex etc.)
• With Vendor Delivery Service (eg. Vendors own delivery service that respects PAM token)
• With Address from Personal Address Manager

Is the "With Address" scenario a Personal Address Manager (PAM) case? However the PAM might be the place where user relationship policies are stored. "With Address" was eliminated as a policy statement by vendors.

The "with Delivery Service" was selected to analyze.

Roles:

• Shopper (S:)
• Merchant (M:)

Assumption:

• Policy Assurance and Warranty

Scenario:

Step 1.

S: Shop at a compliant store

M: Offer VRM ("use VRM" button on the web page)

Step 2.

S: Click "Use VRM"

M: Endpoint Request

Step 3.

S: VRM Discovery End point - ie. PAM Address pointer

M: Push to provision

Step 4.

S: Provision vendor

S: Give Vendor token (with policy)

M: Policy agreement

M: Use token to get address

M: Use Address

M: Delete

M: Confirmation of End of use

Side notes:

Initiatives are underway to build a policy framework. (SAML and WS-Policy?)

This was a complex discussion to develop the scenario. Edits to refine this discussion can be made on the VRM Workshop Wiki in the Personal Address Manager page.

HealthCampMd Goes Live

Join us at HealthCampMd, June 14 2008!

We are going to try an experiment today with Stickam

We will try to broadcast live from HealthCampMd

If you want to Twitter prefix your Tweets with HealthCampMd and we will use Summize to pick up comment streams.

HealthCampMd is this Saturday June 14th

This weekend is HealthCampMd at Villa Julie College in Owings Mills, MD. You can still sign up by clicking on the link below:

Join us at HealthCampMd, June 14 2008! The initial theme of the Camp was:

"How Healthcare could be transformed by the adoption of Social Media, Open Standards and Web 2.0 technologies."

It will be fascinating to see how the camp actually develops because, unlike traditional conferences, the agenda will be set by whoever attends. There is always a possibility that someone volunteering to give a 1 to 3 minute lightning talk, at the start of the day, on a subject they are passionate about might point the ensuing sessions in a new and unanticipated direction. That is the great thing about these conferences and camps. There is so much reward to be gained from actively participating. There are some great sessions being prepared:

• Health 2.0 - What do we mean by Health 2.0? - Where are the opportunities to apply Social networking to the Health Care landscape?
• Using mobile technology to make better food choices
• Clinical healthcare opportunities vs consumer (patient) healtcare business models
• Using Clinical Informatics professionals in the 2.0 business quest.
• Personal Health Records (PHRs) - using Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault to build open source software that allow patients and clinicians to collaborate on each patient's care.
• Biology Futures, particularly personal genomics and synthetic biology
• Personal genome analysis with SNPedia

Will we get through all of these topics? We will have to see but the people who are coming are passionate about the issues and that should lead to fascinating discussions.

I am not an expert in running a barcamp so I am looking forward to the experience. I have been thinking about how best to engage people so I have stolen unashamedly from my experience at the recent AgileCoachCamp which was facilitated by the excellent John Engle. John did an amazing job of quietly guiding a passionate crowd. His facilitation skills are quietly effective, a real master. They are big shoes to fill.

Will I fit in?

One thing that I had concerns with when I thought about attending my first camp was whether I would fit in. We all probably have that concern in some form. What I have learned is that the passion that people bring to these events makes it a welcoming experience for everyone. It doesn't matter what level of expertise you bring, everyone has something to contribute. Indeed, not being an expert can be an advantage. The non-experts bring that uncanny ability to stop an expert in their tracks by asking a question as simple as "Why?" causing the expert to consider an issue from a completely different perspective.

So, I urge you, if you are in the Baltimore area on June 14th come down and join in. You will be made welcome. Bring your enthusiasm to learn and participate.

Once again, here is the link: http://barcamp.org/HealthCampMd

Data Portability and Open Standards

As a Twitter user I am interested in the quest for stability. It was the discussion around dealing with scalability that led me to Eran Hammer-Lahav's thoughtfully considered postings on building a scalable micro-blogging platform This is even referenced on Twitter's own blog. Well one thing leads to another and I realized that Eran was also interested in Data Portability, to the point that his involvement with OAuth has lead to him being recruited by Yahoo as an Open Standards Evangelist. Congratulations Eran!

Eran has some interesting views on the Data Portability initiative. On a number of levels I have to agree with him. I think that the individual open standards such as OpenID, OAuth and Microformats are the places to develop the technical aspects of the respective standards. But DataPortability.org has a valid role to play.

What is the role of DataPortability.org?

Internet standards succeed because they are simple and open.

The potential downfall of DataPortability.org, if it ventures in to the technical domain, is that it will make things more complicated. OpenID works when you can demonstrate to developers how it can be implemented in under an hour. OAuth works when you can demonstrate that you can build an interface once and easily implement it with many other sites.

I have been considering how we can use Open Standards to created a Federated Single-Sign-On that works seamlessly across connected business partners. This seems like an ideal issue in which DataPortability.org can play an important role because creating solutions like Single-Sign-On may require more than one open standard to be implemented - all working together.

If you think about creating a robust OpenID enabled sign-on capability then OpenID may need to be combined with YADIS. Sam Ruby gives a great tutorial on this in his "OpenID for non-super Users" blog post.

So, let's have the individual open standards developers focus on their respective worlds and evolve DataPortability.org to promote the benefits of portability and act as a place where the standards developers can discuss the inter-operability of their respective standards. It can become the place to go to find best practices and prototypes that promote the benefits of combining open standards to meet real-world portability use cases.

For anyone interested in Data Portability or Social Media these issues will be discussed at HealthCampMd being held in Owings Mills, MD on June 14th. Sign up for the conference at http://barcamp.org/HealthCampMd

Health 2.0 - Healthcare and the data portability challenge

Recently I was asked to put together a keynote address for a TiE-DC event. Tie-DC is the DC Chapter of an organization of Entrepreneurs and innovators in the Mid-Atlantic region. The theme of the event was the transformation of Healthcare IT and the elusive patient interface. With working for the leading health care payer in the region this is something I am keenly interested in. The health care industry faces a period of transformation driven by social, political and technological changes. One of the things that has drawn me to the healthcare industry is the potential for technology and the social aspects of Web 2.0 to dramatically change the delivery of healthcare services for the better. The scale of the challenge in healthcare is enormous. A challenge that is too big for any one company to solve alone. When you come to this realization you just have to adopt a different mindset. The healthcare industry in the US is heading towards representing 20% of the entire economy. It already operates at a massive scale. So where can we look for different approaches? We need to look to the Internet. The web operates at enormous scale yet it is not tightly coupled and controlled in the same way the largest players in the Healthcare industry control their networks. The healthcare industry can and should learn from the Web. But what should we learn? I believe that if we want to transform healthcare we need to remove some of the complexity. I am a big proponent of Data Portability and its principle components:

• OpenID
• OAut
• Microformats

These technologies are rapidly increasing in popularity on the web because they are simple to implement. Data portability grew out of the desire by users to have portability of their social network relationship information between different social networks. The challenge that the Data portability movement is attempting to address is closely paralleled by the evolution of the Personal Health Record in the healthcare industry. We will want to own our own health information, but we will need to be able to share that information with medical providers and others. We will need a universal ability to share information, but share it securely. At the same time the process of managing access will need to be easy. We can learn an awful lot from the simple approaches that characterize OpenID, OAuth, microformats and other pervasive technologies that have succeeded on the Web. To understand how dire the current situation is just look at this tale that was posted on the Health 2.0 Blog.