April 8 2009 Conference Call

Conference Call Notes

Drafted by Joe Andrieu, April 8, 2009

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#vrm at chat.freenode.net

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Attendees

• Joe Andrieu
• Dean Landsman
• Keith Hopper
• Brett McDowell
• Drummond Reed

Notes

Association

Joe updated the group on the new association being formed. (He was talking and hence, not taking good notes.)

The post-facto notes:

The Association came out of conversations of the Organizational Committee. Joe first suggested a chapter-based individual membership organization in Mountain View at the steering committee meeting after the last IIW, where individual members elects the leadership rather than having a corporate board run by large $$$ corporate members (as most consortia run).

Then conversations in the VPI SIG led to the idea of a standard agreement for the use of VPI: the idea that companies would become signatories to a contract that covers the use of volunteered personal information and that such a contract would cover both the "good housekeeping seal" desire of "VRM Compliant" or "VPI Compliant", while also defining crisp, clear, legally enforceable terms as to what "Compliant" actually means.

These two came together as a way to engage a larger conversation to catalyze the creation of user driven services, a category term that includes VRM as well as situations that aren't vendor-based or relationship-based. Joe drafted a proposal and shared it with the organizational committee. With their support for the proposal, he got more input and feedback from others in the community and invited a Startup Committee to help make this proposal happen. The members of this committee made a commitment of 10 hours/week through the May launch to work through the details.

The Startup Committee members are

• Doc Searls
• Joe Andrieu
• Iain Henderson
• Drummond Reed
• Chris Carfi
• Bill Washburn
• Asa Hardcastle
• Judi Clark

This committee will be working through the details to get the organization going, including electing the board of directors. The criteria for that board will be shared with the community along with a request for nominations.

[The name is still under discussion. It began as the Association for User Driven Services (AUDS). We considered Individual Rights in Information Society (IRIS) and most recently I-Rights. We're still working on it.]

The association is currently best defined as two major activities. First, a chapter-based conversational architecture to expand the surface area of engagement. We want to get more people engaged to help figure out how we do this stuff. This includes technical solution, business models, and regulatory needs. Second, a public process to generate a Standard Agreement that legitimately represents the voice of the user.

Along the way, other projects may be useful, but these are the two defining characteristics that we hope will simplify, clarify, and focus the work so we can (1) make a concrete different quickly and (2) collaborate and co-create with the many other constituencies and organizations working in the Internet and Identity spaces.

ListenLog

Keith updated the group on ListenLog progress. The next NPR tuner is going to be released May 31 and we would like to be in there.

~1.5 million users. For a while it was the #1 free app on iTunes.

Because of the shear amount of users, we want to make sure we make the right decisions.

Because of the timeline and the impact, we are looking to make it super simple. We've outlined some end-user functionality on the wiki, but at a minimum, we are writing data to the log.

One particular hurdle is figuring out how to use the device as an identity "token" without allowing that identity to be reverse engineered from the datastore. This would allow users to claim their datastore through an associated authentication loop, while avoiding both a signup process and identity-tagged log entries. (That is, the logs should be effectively anonymous.

Brett asked about IP regimes... have we figured that out? (No.)

OpenID by definition is a redirect mechanism. So, we'd like to have a device-based authentication without the redirection ceremony.

If we solve that, we have then proved out an OpenID-based architecture that uses device-based authentication, without an interruptive ceremony.

Next Meeting

• April 22 2009 Conference Call