September 17 2008 Conference Call

Conference Call Notes

Drafted by Joe Andrieu, September 17, 2008

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#vrm at chat.freenode.net

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Attendees

• Joe Andrieu
• Renee Lloyd
• Doc Searls
• Keith Hopper

Notes

Organizational Development

Two parts. ProjectVRM and a new organization. For the first, we'd like to do more research. For the second, we'd like to create a new organization outside Berkman that can carry things on in the greater scope.

Want to learn from InfoCard foundation, where Vendors have a voice but without control. Thinking of making it about relationship management more broadly, not just Vendor Relationship Management.

We've bought relationshipmanagement.org. What we do with that is open in this sense. There are discussions going on regarding IDTBD. There are several organizations involved that are parallel, Dataportability, InfoCard. What we want is a Switzerland and not a Soviet State. That is, we don't want VRM subsumed into a larger umbrella, even if that umbrella is largely aligned with our goals.

Relationship Management verses Vendor Relationship Management

Hard choices. One the one hand, relationship management is so broad as to be potentially unfocused, making it challenging to get closure on primary use cases and therefrom, specifications for real services. Sometimes it isn't so much us verses them, as perhaps Vendor/Customer suggests.

Doc says we can have an organization named Relationship Management and still have it focused on VRM.

Lots of discussion about feature creep and our organizational capability, especially vis-a-vis our efforts to define the most simple use case we could think of Change of Address.

Also discussions of IPR, given current activities on PAM and r-button and future potential activities with user-driven search.

Two options (do both?) The quick and the Rich. First, a quick IPR policy built on Drummond & Paul's domain expertise matching Joe and Iain's contributors' needs. If we can get those four constituents to agree, we'll probably have something that works, at least in the short term. Second, working with Berkman and Harvard Law to work deeply with the issue of Open Source innovation when interoperability is critical and therefore standards compliance a necessary component. Taking that further, this aligns nicely with Berkman's mission to think & rethink about how the Internet is changing our society.

This is related to the "because" effect. How do you maximize that? When does it work?

There are also interesting conversations about TOS on websites...

Insight: there is a lot of commonality here with the Uniform Commercial Code. Which is a "default" TOS for commercial behavior in the US. Perhaps we need to update UCC.

Commitment: IPR process. Let's get the core group in a room and hash something out.

Action Item: Joe will write up some thoughts on updating UCC as a foundation for user-asserted TOS.

Next Meeting

• August 20 2008 Conference Call