[OpenID board] BOARD VOTE: Motion to update Rails plugin andOpenID.net ...

[Dick Hardt]

On 18-Dec-08, at 9:58 AM, Brian Kissel wrote:

> I’m not insisting on anything.  What I am questioning is whether we  
> can find a way, any way, to make the UX on OIDF more intuitive.  If  
> Google, Yahoo, AOL, Verisign, Vidoop, or the OIDF membership  
> community can come up with a more intuitive way to log into our  
> website, I think that’s a win and we should consider those options.   
> For those who haven’t talked to hundreds of mainstream RPs (not  
> blogging sites with tech savvy users), typing in a URL is not  
> intuitive for the masses.  Maybe someday it will be, but today it  
> isn’t – period.  So it’s all well and good to be “neutral” but if we  
> want to drive adoption and usage, we need to respond to what the  
> market wants, or at least offer them options that are more  
> compelling than what they’ve told us so far is clearly not.

We can drive to deliver what the market wants without compromising the  
Foundation.

>
> When we talked with the former ED of the Bluetooth SIG, he gave an  
> example about demonstrating Bluetooth for press and analysts.   The  
> initial demos he gave were using a Toshiba laptop and mouse because  
> Toshiba was one of the founding members of the SIG.  But the user  
> experience at that time was pretty bad with Toshiba, so it didn’t  
> serve the purpose of getting press and analysts excited about the  
> reliability and ease of use of Bluetooth.  He then switched to doing  
> demos with an Apple laptop and mouse (even though Apple wasn’t yet a  
> member of the SIG), and the demos were a smashing success and  
> resulted in much more favorable press and analysts coverage.

And our future ED can do demos of OpenID on whatever sites supporting  
OpenID make sense to communicate a message he/she is delivering. The  
OIDF website is not the site to use for this purpose.

>
> All I’m saying is that we can’t be dogmatic, we need to think about  
> what our mission is, then make sure we’ve evaluated the best ways to  
> achieve our mission.

Yes we can about the OIDF website. The mission there is to be vendor  
neutral and interact with our membership. We should use vendor neutral  
OpenID technology and not endorse a particular approach.


> We recently moved our wiki to PB Wiki which is provided by a vendor,  
> presumably because it gave us the functionality we needed at a  
> reasonable cost.  We didn’t write our own wiki software.
> Many of the committees are using Google docs for collaboration, and  
> that’s OK.

PB Wiki and Google docs are not targetted at the OpenID community. RPX  
is.
I am amazed that you are still arguing this point. Another vendor is  
not happy RPX is being used on the OIDF website. We are not dealing  
with the hypothetical. There is an issue.

>
> We have a lot of creative members of the OIDF, why don’t we ask them  
> how to improve the UX of the OIDF website login in a way that will  
> be intuitive for the masses that we ultimately hope to serve?  If  
> we’re going to spend $2K, I’d advocate spending it on implementing  
> that UX.

There is not $2K that we are wondering how to spend.

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