| Alan, Iain, William, et. al., am I wrong that the UK gov wasn't ready until recently to make a PR push?
That was the sense I got from the guys I met with in August here. They wanted to get their ducks in a row first.
In any case, I think it's huge that any government has its act together around personal data, PDSes and the rest of it. Having a government interested and supportive of our work is a Good Thing, regardless of whatever complaints might be raised about it. I hope Dan and others working the beat will run with it.
Doc On Nov 6, 2011, at 7:58 PM, Dan Miller wrote: I'd like to stay optimistic here.
The UK gov't is far ahead of the U.S. in terms of promoting some vehicle for me (a customer or prospect) to have a modicum of control over the information (data, metadata, exhaust data...) I provide to the firms I'm doing business with, as well as those with which I may or may not want to carry out business.
I have been shocked at how little visibility the whole endeavor has generated. I'm going to step up efforts to cover it because I think it's important for companies and third parties to flesh out mechanisms for people to take better control of the relationship between themselves and the companies they do business with (C2B)... gaining control of their data is a big step, but it may turn out to be more labor intensive (too much work!) than we would like.
-Dan
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 2:55 PM, <
">
> wrote:
Absolutely.
Interestingly, the midata project in the UK is being run by the Department of Business as part of an economic growth strategy as well as a consumer empowerment strategy. The argument is that midata - along with other forms and sources of personal data - are really only the raw ingredients of new personal information (i.e. VRM) services, which are needed to extract value for individuals from the data.
The value doesn't lie so much in the raw data itself; the value is only created when individuals can (in the words of the press release) "use this data to gain insights into their own behavour, make more informed choices about products and services, and manage their lives more efficiently".
midata is thus (continuing from the press release) "a platform upon which the innovation and services that drive growth can be built".
Alan
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Behlendorf <
" target="_blank">
>
To: Drummond Reed <
" target="_blank">
>; Markus Sabadello <
" target="_blank">
>
CC: ProjectVRM list <
" target="_blank">
>
Sent: Sun, 6 Nov 2011 19:18
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] UK gov launches "midata" data giveback program
I suspect that the first stage of midata will result in data dumps from companies without much metadata. Your Tesco data dump, for instance, is likely to look very much like a compilation of all your receipts from the Tesco cash register. A glance at a typical receipt these days will show a ton of fairly inscrutable terms and numbers, from which you might clearly make out the total and date of transaction, but might struggle to figure out what it was that you actually bought. I suspect a secondary set of services will evolve... will need to evolve... that help parse all that into something more semantically meaningful. That parse algorithm should be common property, a la wikipedia, so that they can be more quickly built and continually tuned, and so post-parse data could be shared between PDS's. Perhaps this is a useful project for the Customer Commons.
Brian
|