February 8 2007 Meeting notes

Conference Call Notes

Drafted by Joe Andrieu, February 8, 2007

Invitation

VRM Conference Call - Thursday February 8 at 10:30 AM Pacific / 1:30 PM Eastern

As discussed at the January 25th meeting in Redwood City, there will be a Project VRM Conference call on Thursday, February 8th at 10:30 AM Pacific / 1:30 PM Eastern.

Here are the conference call details:

Date: Thursday, February 8, 2007 Time: 10:30 PDT, 1:30 EST

Dial-in Number: 1-712-432-3000

(Note that the other number that used to be listed here doesn't work.)

Conference Bridge Access Code #: 170658

Please note: we are going to record the call for potential future use as a reference audio or podcast.

See you (well, hear you) then and there.

Attendees

• Britt
• Dean
• Iain
• Whit
• Joe
• Tom
• Kevin
• Doc

Status

what	who	when	status
----------	----------	----------	----------
open id on wiki	david	no date
group blog/RSS to wiki (venus)	doc	no date	still working on it
project VRM definition	doc	1 week	still working on it
thurs, 1:30pm EST concall setup	dean	8 feb	DONE
Initiative brainstorm page	joe	1 feb	DONE
brainstorm Initiatives	all	ongoing
relationship/expression matrix	chris/deb	feb 1	drafted, chris is currently playing the role of 'the bottleneck'

Notes

(These are not well attributed. sources vary. these notes do not represent the consensus of the group, but rather comments by individuals)

• IM/IRC/Jabber backchannel would be a good thing
• Shared VRM Blog might just work as tag-based feed aggreation
• VRM fix to Yahoo/Flicker problem: accumulating acquired companies' signons and accumulating users' signons. Can we make headway by coming at this from the user side?
• Fractional horsepower/Personal RFP same thing? (Sure: Joe)
  • Any known existing technologies
    • EB-XML
    • EDI
    • RosettaNet

• We have to conform to existing businesses and business practices, so that supporting VRM appears as "money over the transom".

• Where does VRM touch existing commerce systems:
  • Sun
  • IBM
  • SAP
  • HP

• Do we need sign on?
  • No, because shopping should be publicly accessible
  • Yes, because not all information will be made available to the public
  • Yes, because vendors need additional information
  • We need some persistent identity, ala cookies, for relationships to accrete around. (Signons are one way to do that.)

• Note that we should probably be talking to people in marketing.

• Internet Identity Workshop May 14-16, 2007 at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA
• Desire for a meeting focused on individual initiatives, with vendors participating

• Target is a potential VRM supporter. Nate Garven has apparently dones some interesting things and we have some relationships there.

• DRM & Apple. This is an important development, for Jobs to step up and advocate abandonment of DRM.
  • What we need are big names and big companies who can step up and agitate/advocate/work towards a new vision.
  • What can we find that is user-driven, user-centric, that can help resolve the DRM dilemma and simultaneously open up the silos.

• Public Radio & VRM approach to fundraising that can make it easier to have users pay for what they consume?

• What are our goals?
  • Near term
    • At a practical level, conversational activities and projects going forward. Growing the wiki. Who is doing what? Etc.
    • Organizational development: team building, process creation, community development, initiative facilitation
    • Real initiatives with progress from problem definition through to real Protocols.
    • Forum for discussion that isn't tied to any particular commercial interest. The goal is to create tools that are open source and ubiquitous.
  • Long term
    • Fixing the market. Getting rid of or reducing the kind of unproductive asymmetries we have between supply side and demand side, at least in the b2c world.
    • Reduction of transaction costs, especially around the transaction costs of vendor-customer relationships. Law & Economics has shown that when transaction costs are non-existent, resources naturally allocate to the highest utility use. Every reduction in transaction costs increases our overall alignment and use of resources.

Action Items

what	who	when	status
----------	----------	----------	----------
open id on wiki	david	no date
group blog/RSS to wiki (venus)	doc	no date	still working on it
project VRM definition	doc	1 week	still working on it
brainstorm Initiatives	all	ongoing
relationship/expression matrix	chris/deb	feb 1
Set up Jabber Host for conference calls	doc	no date	new

Next Meeting

February 22, 1:30PM EST