Fuse: Connecting Your Car to the Rest of Your Life

I just backed my friend Phil Windley’s new Kickstarter project, Fuse. Everyone with a car should go back it now. Everyone who cares about data privacy should also go back it.

Every car has an on-board computer with tons of data: your mileage, your average speed, even your tire pressure. When you take your car into the shop, mechanics plug into this computer to access that data so that they can diagnose your car.

I’ve been wanting to access that data myself forever, and it’s not just because I’m a data geek. As someone who travels a lot for business, I track my mileage. Not only is it a royal pain to do manually, it just seems wrong, given that your car already has this data. But until recently, I had no ability to access it.

Fuse unlocks that data, and gives you access. It consists of a device that you plug into your car’s diagnostic outlet and a mobile app that gives you access to that data.

That alone should make you want this. But I’m going out of my way to blog about this project because of what Fuse does under the hood.

The problem with most of the emerging apps in this space is that they essentially trade convenience and coolness for ownership of your data. Most of us don’t pay attention to that. We’re too pre-occupied by the coolness. Some of us feel vaguely uneasy about the trade-off, but we do it anyway. Coolness is a powerful motivator.

Phil has been a leader in the digital identity space for a very long time. He literally wrote the book on it. He’s part of a community of folks who thinks that you — the individual — should own and control your data. Enabling this is a hard technical problem, but it’s an even knottier social problem.

Fuse is built on top of a trust and privacy framework that my friends, Drummond Reed and Andy Dale, have helped evolved. Fuse is cool, compelling, and socially responsible. These are the kinds of apps that will help create the kind of world that I want to live in.

If you’d like to read more about these nitty gritty aspects of Fuse, go check out Phil’s blog. If you’d like to read more about the bigger vision behind technology like this, start with Vendor Relationship Management (VRM).

Don’t forget to back the project!

Implications of the Kintera Data Sharing Announcement

Andy Dale reported earlier this month that La Leche League will be using Kintera‘s software for member and donor management. More importantly, the two organizations will use open “standards” to share data between their respective systems. Andy’s company, ooTao, is implementing the data sharing using technology known as XDI.    (LK3)

The data sharing problem is well-known in every large organization, and it boils down to this: You have common data across multiple systems and databases, and none of it is linked. Because it’s not linked, it’s difficult to update information, it’s difficult to maintain a high-level accuracy, and it’s difficult to do any serious reporting. Every time you add a new system, it gets exponentially harder to do all of the above.    (LK4)

Does Kintera’s announcement mean that the data sharing problem has been solved? No. But it’s still an important announcement. To understand why, it’s important to delve a bit deeper into what makes the data sharing problem hard in the first place.    (LK5)

First, standards are inherently hard.    (LK6)

Second, getting an established market of vendors to agree on a set of standards is even harder. The problem is that every vendor thinks that lock-in is good for their business. The bigger problem is that they’re absolutely right, as long as lock-in is the status quo. Open data sharing is not viable until a critical mass of tools support it, and there’s no short-term return on being first to market (other than marketing value, which I would argue is underappreciated).    (LK7)

Third, those who have been trying to address the problem have been going about it the wrong way. In particular, they’ve made the social problem bigger when it should be smaller, and they’ve made the technical problem smaller when it should be bigger.    (LK8)

The most common mistake that people make when trying to agree on a standard is to try to get everyone on board up-front. That is the path to certain failure. The best approach is to get two people on board up-front, build something that works and is open, and then approach others about joining the effort. Getting small groups of people to collaborate is hard enough. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.    (LK9)

On the technical front, people seem to have oversimplified the problem. It’s not just about coming up with the right set of APIs and XML schemas. You have to also think about identity — on many levels, as it turns out. The data needs to be addressable, which means you have to think deeply about identifiers. Also, the most common type of common data is people information — in other words, digital identities. The requirements around Digital Identity — especially User-Centric Identity — are more complex. The good news is that engineers are well-equipped to handle this kind of complexity; you just need to make sure it’s part of the problem statement.    (LKA)

Back to the Kintera announcement. They’re doing the right thing by building something that works between two organizations, rather than declaring a standard up-front and trying to convince everyone to jump on board willy nilly.    (LKB)

They’re also doing the right thing by hiring ooTao to implement this piece, because ooTao understands the identity problem, and it has credibility in the grassroots identity community. While calling XDI a “standard” is a stretch — there’s not even a published spec yet — it will most certainly be open, and a number of organizations and individuals have already contributed to it. More importantly, all of this stuff will work with OpenID and i-names, two technologies that can be accurately called open standards.    (LKC)

Will XDI “win”? It doesn’t matter. The architectural and practical lessons learned in implementing and deploying something real will move us one significant step closer to solving the data sharing problem, regardless of the role that XDI plays in the the long-term solution.    (LKD)

Should you avoid XDI because of the uncertainty over whether it will “win”? Absolutely not. The architectural changes you will need to make to support XDI will be largely spec-independent. Should you need to migrate to a different spec at a later point, the work required will be relatively minor.    (LKE)

Ph-Off and i-name Promotion

I’m at the Identity Open Space in Santa Clara right now. Lots of good stuff scheduled today, including a session I’m co-leading on Identity Commons, the next generation. Two things worth mentioning now. First, i-names have officially launched. A lot of folks purchased i-names through the Identity Commons fundraiser way back when, and those will finally become useful. If you didn’t have a chance to buy one at the special rate a few years ago, you can buy them at a special rate over the next three days: $5 for the first year of registration. Go to:    (L5U)

and register before 7pm PT, this Thursday, September 14.    (L5W)

Second, Andy Dale has whipped up a cool, anti-phishing Firefox plugin for OpenID users appropriately named, Ph-Off. OpenID and similar technologies rely on the notion of an Identity Broker — a third-party site that handles authentication. Because these Identity Brokers will become increasingly important, we need good ways to be sure that things that look like our i-brokers actually are our i-brokers. When you configure Ph-Off, the toolbar turns green and you get a green thumbs up indicator when you visit your actual i-broker. It’s simple and useful.    (L5X)

OpenID 2.0 Developer Day, August 10

Two important OpenID developments to announce. First, there are a bunch of $5K bounties available for folks who integrate OpenID into Open Source projects. You heard me right — you can get some cash for doing something you probably want to do anyway. Second, Kaliya Hamlin announced an OpenID developer day in Berkeley next Thursday, August 10, from 6-9pm. The lineup includes David Recordon, Andy Dale, Mary Hodder, and Scott Kveton. I’m going to try to show, and I hope many of you do the same.    (KWN)

Bay Area XDI Workshop, December 5

Andy Dale and the good folks at ooTao will be hosting a workshop on XDI on Monday, December 5, 2005, from 1-4pm at ooTao’s offices in Alameda, CA. This will be an excellent opportunity to learn the technical ins-and-outs of XDI and how it enables permission-based data sharing. Register now; spots are limited.    (K1A)