[Community] Preserving Identity Commons Purpose and Principles

[Mary Ruddy]

This is Mary, now back from The Catalyst conference where, as Drummond said,
we had a lot of  conversations about making the right things happen with
respect to our overall community.

To the "tier 1" List below, I would also add, 

1) Some visibility to the existence of the group so that like minded and
interested individuals can more easily find it without it needing to mount a
separate marketing effort, and so that others seeing a similar need won't
create a duplicative organization.  This is done, by belonging to a larger
organization that has a website, issues quarterly reports, publically refers
to examples of its groups etc. 
2) Parent organization with an appropriate reputation so that a lightly
formed group has credibility or at least the benefit of the doubt at
startup.

-Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: community-bounces at idcommons.net
[mailto:community-bounces at idcommons.net] On Behalf Of Brett McDowell
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2008 1:27 PM
To: Iain Henderson
Cc: ID Commons---Community Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Community] Preserving Identity Commons Purpose and Principles

On Jun 28, 2008, at 12:49 PM, Iain Henderson wrote:

> I'll be at the VRM face to face and would welcome the discussion; but 
> many folks won't be there so could be good to iterate further on the 
> e-mail list?
>
> Iain

Ok.  So, since most of us here are comfortable with how to develop a good
technology, let's borrow those best practices to guide this effort, i.e.
let's start with requirements and use-cases.

I'd say Projects come in different flavors, let's refer to them as "tiers".

A "tier 1" project would require no more than what ID Commons WG's offer
today, which is the same thing Liberty Alliance SIG's offer, and the same
thing that DataPortability "labs" offer.  It's basically just:
- email list
- wiki
- various opportunities (without mandate) to gather in person, at your own
expense (including a reg. fee)
- copyright license (CreativeCommons)

So, is that about accurate?  Before I go on to "tier 2" projects I want to
see that we are in basic agreement with "tier 1".  Did I miss something in
the requirements for a "tier 1" project?

We also need some examples of "tier 1" (T1) projects so we keep ourselves
honest.  I'd say my EUCLId ID Commons Working Group (now
defunct) was a T1 Project... the goal was discussion, information material
generation (non-normative) and advocacy.  It never had the goal of producing
normative specification so it didn't need an IP policy that addressed
patents.  It didn't need to produce code so it didn't need source code
management or a contributors license agreement.  It didn't need any
staffing... well maybe it did which is why it is now defunct.  It didn't
need its own brand, but maybe it would have down the road.  It didn't need
any professional compliance program to ensure its output was implemented
correctly, because it had not normative output.  etc.  (you can see where
I'm going with this...  
higher tier projects need these other things and a financial model to
provide them... if they consolidate they get the best of all worlds through
shared resources and infrastructure)

--Brett


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