[OpenID board] Perception of the Foundation (Was: Fwd: [OpenID] Google's proprietary discovery extension?)

Thu Jul 30 03:44:44 UTC 2009

First of all I am not proposing anything, nor am i complaining about
anything. I am just bringing to your notice what I think is a very serious
problem with the OpenID board.
And yes let us face it. There definitely is a serious leadership vacuum
here. I am sure every one is aware of it but nobody speaks about it. 

As you said Don is an infrastructure guy, but why bring Don into this at
all. I dont think he was hired for a leadership role at all. The leader has
to be the chairman of the board. The chairman must be a technical wiz plus
someone who can lead from the front, and should be rallying the community.

I cant see someone who is good at both here, technology and rallying the
flock.
Actually I dont mind one of the corporate members being chairman of the
board provided he has a written mandate from his company to work as he
wishes independently on a board like this. Something like the mandate given
to Eran from Yahoo.

Chris Messina wrote:
> 
> Santosh, I'm not sure what you're proposing.
> If there is a leadership vacuum in the community, complaining about it
> doesn't seem like an effective way to address it.
> 
> That said, I certainly think that the Foundation via the board has not
> been
> terribly effective in its communications and outreach since the elections.
> That said, much has been happening, albeit in many different places so
> keeping track of everything is very challenging — even for those directly
> working on these things.
> 
> A couple weeks back I sent Don a list of interview-style questions that I
> had hoped would have made it to the blog by now, but alas I've not heard
> back from him yet. Don has pointed out that he is more of an
> infrastructure
> kind of guy — who likes to operate behind the scenes, and so combining
> that
> style of leadership with an otherwise quiet board can of course lead to
> questions of progress.
> 
> I also noticed that the board's meeting minutes have not been published to
> the wiki recently, so I'll go an make sure that they are copied from this
> list to the wiki, so at least you can trace the conversations that have
> gone
> on over the last several months.
> 
> I would be interested in hearing solid proposals for rallying the
> community
> — and coordinating efforts if the board is unable or unavailable to do so.
> I
> have ideas myself, but not the time or ability to implement them at the
> moment.
> 
> Chris
> 
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Santosh Rajan <santrajan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Allen I think you missed a major point here.
>> It is nice to know about Yahoo's work. Other coorporates have also done a
>> lot of work, like Google, Facebook etc.
>>
>> But what about the independent community members? Nothing!! Or atleast I
>> haven't seen any work coming from then.
>>
>> I think in Open Communities the most important contributions must come
>> from
>> the independant members and not the coorporate members. Independent
>> members
>> are not "boxed in" by coorporate objectives.
>>
>> Corporate members are focussed by their companies. Independent
>> individuals
>> need community leadership, otherwise they will end up running around like
>> headless chicken. Which is more or less what is happenning now.
>>
>>
>>
>> Allen Tom-2 wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > Yahoo is very heavily invested in OpenID and we have a bunch of
>> > engineers and designers currently working on enhancements to our OpenID
>> > service.  Earlier this year, we worked with the community to write the
>> > OpenID UI and OAuth/Hybrid Extensions, and the Yahoo OP will be
>> > implementing both of these extensions in the very near future.
>> >
>> > In addition to protocol enhancements, we have a crack team of
>> UI/Product
>> > designers and researchers who are actively experimenting with ways to
>> > improve the overall usability of our OpenID service. We'll be deploying
>> > many significant upgrades to the Yahoo OpenID Provider's user interface
>> > later this year. The new OpenID UI, along with support for the UI and
>> > Hybrid Extensions, and our soon to be released support for Open
>> Social's
>> > REST based APIs (including Portable Contacts) will be a huge upgrade to
>> > our existing Open Stack offering.
>> >
>> > We've also been working behind the scenes to line up several new and
>> > exciting Relying Parties to accept OpenID. Every potential Relying
>> Party
>> > that I've been working with wants to accept not just Yahoo OpenID, but
>> > also OpenIDs from other Providers, which is making a really strong case
>> > for interoperability and open standards.
>> >
>> > Yahoo along with other OPs and Relying Parties are committing plenty of
>> > resources for OpenID  and are actively working towards the goal of
>> > having OpenID reach widespread usage and adoption.  Many of these
>> > efforts are behind the scenes, and aren't really visible on the public
>> > mailing lists, so perhaps the OpenID Foundation can take the lead in
>> > publicizing the activities that its membership is actively working on.
>> >
>> > Allen
>> >
>> >
>> > Nat wrote:
>> >> Hi
>> >>
>> >> Inline below:
>> >>
>> >> =nat at Tokyo via iPhone
>> >>
>> >> On 2009/07/30, at 2:22, David Recordon <david at sixapart.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> Forwarding these three posts from the General list.  Not because I
>> >>> agree with all of the sentiments expressed, but because it shows how
>> >>> we as a board and organization are clearly not being transparent
>> >>> enough in the activities that are actually being taken on.
>> >>>
>> >>> Two ideas I think that we should seriously consider are:
>> >>> 1) making use of a project management tool like Basecamp
>> >>> (http://www.basecamphq.com/) so that at least the entire board and
>> >>> Don know the status of each project that is underway
>> >>
>> >> I strongly agree to this.
>> >>
>> >>> 2) having Don write a monthly blog post about OpenID's achievements
>> >>> the past month and what the Foundation has accomplished
>> >>
>> >> +1
>> >>
>> >>>
>> >>> Thoughts?
>> >>>
>> >>> --David
>> >>>
>> >>> Begin forwarded message:
>> >>>
>> >>>> From: Santosh Rajan <santrajan at gmail.com>
>> >>>> Date: July 28, 2009 11:11:03 PM PDT
>> >>>> To: general at openid.net
>> >>>> Subject: Re: [OpenID] Google's proprietary discovery extension?
>> >>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Hehe! Shade for once I am going to agree with you.
>> >>>> Why do we have a chairman? Isnt he supposed to be leading the flock
>> and
>> >>>> showing the way?
>> >>>> And what about the rest of the board. This is the "coldest" board I
>> >>>> have
>> >>>> ever seen.
>> >>>> I think Eran Hammer should have been the chairman of the board! I
>> >>>> wonder why
>> >>>> he disappeared from here 2 yrs back. (I have seen some posts from
>> >>>> him from
>> >>>> 2007).
>> >>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>> SitG Admin wrote:
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>> There is no sign of the "STD mechanism" coming soon.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Perhaps it will arrive after Chris Messina's "Policy Expression
>> >>>>> Extension" passes ;)
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>> Apathy on the part of the OpenID Foundation.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Inaction, or so it may appear; timely, though?
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>> Half the Identity folk have moved on to Kantara Initiative.
>> >>>>>> The Other half to the Open Web foundation.
>> >>>>>> XRI TC has tied itself in knots.
>> >>>>>> And the hilarious part is that there are folk involved in all
>> >>>>>> these three
>> >>>>>> foundations!
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Sounds like good separation of duties to me. If the rest of us can
>> >>>>> still interop (and work is still being done that *needs* to be done
>> >>>>> before we can move forward), it doesn't really matter where most of
>> >>>>> the various communities is doing that work.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>> No idea were the rest of us should bail out to!?
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> If the development of OpenID were to halt now, I think it would be
>> >>>>> Federated implementations that found themselves hardest hit; small,
>> >>>>> independent operators such as myself (working with libraries
>> already
>> >>>>> distributed "in the wild") might not even notice.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> -Shade
>> >>>>> _______________________________________________
>> >>>>> general mailing list
>> >>>>> general at openid.net
>> >>>>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>> -----
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Santosh Rajan
>> >>>> http://santrajan.blogspot.com http://santrajan.blogspot.com
>> >>>> --
>> >>>> View this message in context:
>> >>>>
>> http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Google%27s-proprietary-discovery-extension--tp24414092p24713025.html
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Sent from the OpenID - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> _______________________________________________
>> >>>> general mailing list
>> >>>> general at openid.net
>> >>>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general
>> >>>
>> >>> _______________________________________________
>> >>> board mailing list
>> >>> board at openid.net
>> >>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> board mailing list
>> >> board at openid.net
>> >> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > board mailing list
>> > board at openid.net
>> > http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> -----
>>
>> Santosh Rajan
>> http://santrajan.blogspot.com http://santrajan.blogspot.com
>> --
>> View this message in context:
>> http://www.nabble.com/Perception-of-the-Foundation-%28Was%3A-Fwd%3A--OpenID--Google%27s-proprietary-discovery-extension-%29-tp24724040p24730408.html
>> Sent from the OpenID - Foundation Board mailing list archive at
>> Nabble.com.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> board mailing list
>> board at openid.net
>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>>
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Messina
> Open Web Advocate
> 
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> 

-----

Santosh Rajan
http://santrajan.blogspot.com http://santrajan.blogspot.com 
-- 
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