[projectvrm] Personal Clouds Gathering in SF on the 29th

[Johannes Ernst < >]

(apologies for duplicate posts from other mailing lists)

A few of us usual suspects are organizing the first

Personal Clouds Gathering

January 29th

San Francisco, CA

Registration is free here: http://personalcloud1.eventbrite.com/

Would be great to have some VRM folks there.

From the invite:

This is the first event in the Bay Area for Personal Cloud hackers, builders and makers.

This first meeting is a space where people building personal clouds, developers building personal and community applications, and people intrigued by the possibilities can meet and talk. The agenda: 

• Mix, talk, eat, drink.
  
• Brief overview: What is a Personal Cloud and why might anybody want one?
  
• Six short talks (5 minutes each) presenting interesting applications and discussing challenges
• Discussion and breakouts

Let's connect pioneers and attract settlers to the new land of Personal Clouds so we aren't stuck forever with the dominance of our current Internet overlords.

The speakers so far:

• Adam Spector - Virtrue, host
  
• Kaliya (Identity Woman) Hamlin - Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium
  
• Johannes Ernst - Cloudstore
  
• Phil Windley - Kynetx - Topic: "Personal Clouds Need an Operating System."
• Drummond Reed - Respect Network and Connect Me -Topic: "Why Personal Clouds Need a Network."
• Wildcard TBD
• Wildcard TBD
  

Want to present? There are two open speaker slots and we are seeking people in the community who want to present. If you are one of them please contact Adrian Blakey at: adrianblakey AT gmail DOTCOM.

A little background on Personal Clouds.

A Personal Cloud is similar to a personal computer that runs in the cloud. Just like a personal computer gave control over computing to individuals, personal clouds give control over cloud computing to individuals.

Contrast this to cloud application providers to whom we give up our data, like Google or Facebook, who monetized our data for their benefit – not ours. Just like in the age of the mainframe, the Googles and Facebooks of the world decide which apps we get to run on our data and what terms to dictate to us.

Many of us think we can do better. The core idea of Personal Clouds is to put control back into the hands of the individual: control over our data, our apps, and over the terms of service.

Many hackers have been running early forms of personal or community clouds for years on their own server because they did not want to turn over their data, or their branding, or any other aspect of control to others. Using open-source software such as blogging tools, forums, file and photo sharing and, often, custom code, they set up what's right for them, their families and their communities. Personal Clouds take this idea mainstream, where it has profound implications for a more user-centric, decentralized way of commerce and community. For example, personal clouds make Vendor Relationship Management possible. VRM is the idea that individuals will manage relationships to their vendors the same way vendors manage their customers via CRM. (VRM is courtesy of Doc Searls, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and a Harvard Law School fellow.)

Staying in Touch

If you'd like to learn more about Personal Clouds and stay in touch via a mailing list, take a look at the Personal Clouds Wiki.