Gabe Wachob

SuperDelegates.org

Because the Democratic primary race looks likely to go to the convention, and that the Democratic Party super delegates may swing the nomination one way or another, there's been a lot of interest in the last few days about who exactly these super delegates are. My friend and fellow netroots junkie, Rick Klau, announced SuperDelegates.org today:

In an attempt to shed some light on this process, I built a site over the weekend – SuperDelegates.org. Starting with a terrific list provided by the guys who maintain DemConWatch, I started filling in a little info about the super delegates and linking to their endorsement (if given). After finding a great extension to MediaWiki (KMLExport, in case you’re interested), I was also able to add in geo coordinates (latitude and longitude) to the delegate pages, so that you can see the delegates in a Google Earth layer.

The data is far from complete, but that’s by design: this is a wiki, and the site will succeed only if others decide to contribute to it. It takes just a couple minutes to do some quick searches on Google to find basic info about the delegates, and entering in the basic info on a delegate is simple:

{{Endorsed Barack Obama|Latitude|Longitude}}

I'm helping Rick with this, but with the California primary coming up, I'm quite busy for the next few days helping out my candidate, Barack Obama (Super Duper Tuesday primary election is this coming Feb 5th!). However, if you'd like to help with SuperDelegates.org, please contact me and I'll get you started.

Barack Obama

I don't think its any secret for anybody who knows me that I'm a very big and active supporter of Barack Obama for President. Perhaps even more than I was a Howard Dean supporter 4 years ago. There's so much that that I can say, but I want to make sure that readers of my blog understand that he is the only candidate with a technology issues statement on their web site.

In addition, Don Park created this logo which I think is distinctive, inspiring and catchy:

If you want to get more involved in the campaign, or just want to know more, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Yahoo OpenID Announcement and IPR Policy

Yahoo! announced planned support for OpenID (as a OpenID provider) today. Thats thrilling news - congratulations to everyone at Yahoo! for taking the plunge. The timing, however, is not much of a surprise to me...

If anyone doubts the importance of an IPR policy for your grassroots community-driven open standards effort, this should be an important lesson. A group of us from the OpenID community worked for a number of months with a number of large organizations including Yahoo! to hammer out a OpenID IPR policy (and a lightweight community process to support the policy). That policy wasn't finally agreed to by the OIDF board until mid-December of 2007 (and the announcement on the OpenID site wasn't made until there were only 2 minutes left in 2007!). Without such a policy, large organizations such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun (and a number of others) are not comfortable participating, especially with unclear rules about copyright and patents. While these companies have been itching to contribute to (and use) OpenID in a very community-positive manner, they simply haven't been able to without having a well-defined set of rules to play by. After all, it's the big pockets like them that get sued, not the 5 person startups and independent developers who have been the mainstay of OpenID development until recently.

We'll have to see how this policy and process works out. Its a new thing, and we'll have to explain to a lot of folks why the rules are the way they are. If you are a OpenID community  participant, I encourage you to review the documents, and please do not hesitate to ask questions to me, individuals the board, or the openid-legal email list.

One issue that has not been finalized is dealing with trademark around the OpenID mark. That discussion is starting now. Look for news on that in the upcoming month or two.

Plaxo Implementing I-Names for OpenID

Its good to see that Joseph Smarr of Plaxo got i-name support (in OpenID 2.0) up and working. I'm pleased to see folks in the OpenID, community but outside of the i-name/xri communities, implementing i-name features. Its a well-appreciated sign of support and bodes well for the future of i-names.

I'm really curious to hear what issues, if any, Plaxo might have had doing this implementation and how it affects their overall user experience. There might be some really good lessons here for others. Joseph has already produced a recipe guide for OpenID relying parties - I hope i-name support is added to that document, to the extent that its needed.

XRDS Ancestry

Just for fun, and because I couldn't make it to OpenIDDevCamp,  I thought I'd go back and recount history of the XRDS/XRD schema/concept. The use of the XRD/XRDS for stuff outside XRI was proposed at the IIW 2005 in Berkeley (in what became YADIS), but there's a ton of earlier history...

I believe the first time an extensible XML document format was proposed for the result of XRI resolution was in I think the first time an XML format which resembles what we have today was proposed was in Sep 2003:
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/xri/200309/msg00000.html 

Before that, I think we had been focusing more on using DNS records for resolution (specifically DDDS or SRV or other mechanisms). That document format described what we called at the time "Local Access" service endpoints. They were basically REST endpoints. This was basically the document format that ended up in XRI 1.0... very tailored to the XRI Resolution mechanism and limited to the concepts within XRI (which were admittedly a little unique...) Trusted resolution soon followed (a chain of digitally signed XRD's to ensure the resolution results were authentic). 

XRI 2.0 changed the descriptor format that resulted from XRI resolution. By Feb of 2005, an XRID (XRI Descriptor - that name lasted until very recently) format that resembles today's XRD had been proposed:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/11482/xri20res.pdf 

The XRI syntax and XRI resolution mechanisms were put into separate specs, not because we thought the resolution spec would be used outside XRI, but rather because we anticipated multiple resolution mechanisms for XRIs and wanted to keep the two specs separate to allow them to evolve independently. 

There was a long and (one of many many many) heated discussion about whether XRI resolution services should be described in the same way as other services - that is, whether a Service element should be used to describe endpoint services as well as XRI resolution servers. We had, for a long time, treated those as very different things described with separate elements. The final big change to XRDS/XRD was to make XRI authority resolution "just another service" from the point of view of the XRDS/XRD schema definition. It wasn't until Nov 2005 that the XRI authority was "demoted" to "just another service" in working draft 09 of XRI Res 2.0:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/15310/xri-resolution-V2.0-wd-09.pdf 

The motivation for this conceptual change is documented in section 6 of the document found here: 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/14641/proposed-resolution-use-cases-and-reqs-v1.doc  

and discussed here: 
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/xri/200510/msg00042.html 

In fact, I had recommended at the time that XRI resolution exclude service description altogether, suggesting that surely formats like RDDL or other descriptor formats could be used. That was roundly rejected, as described in minutes documented here: 
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/xri/200510/msg00040.html 

We went ahead and included service description as part of the XRI resolution spec and I guess I'm glad I was wrong... 

     -Gabe 

Memo to OLPC from a Happy XO-1 Dad

Dear OLPC-

I really like the XO-1. So do my kids. Yes, its not perfect, but its really darn good. There's a ton of interesting innovation crammed into that cheap package. But its a shame more kids here and elsewhere in the developed world won't have access to any laptop thats specifically designed for them, now that Give One Get One (G1G1) is no longer offered.

I'm not talking only about about doing good for kids "over there". I want to do good for kids right here at home. And more selfishly, I wouldn't buy my kids a real laptop, even if it cost the same amount of money, because they'll break it and such a laptop isn't designed for them - the XO-1 is. 

I understand your mission is not to make consumer electronics - its to transform the lives of children through enhanced educational experiences Great. But all I'm asking is that you either:

1. Extend G1G1 indefinitely, or
2. Let someone else distribute and/or improve the OLPC XO-1 in the United States and other developed countries (or market segments) where the OLPC doesn't plan to operate. This could be on a Redhat-style model (for-profit, built with community benefit at its core).

The main pushback I hear is that there is strain being put on OLPC developers in supporting the G1G1 program. I understand this completely - any proposal for continued distribution would have to offload support onto the community (which is doing a very good job now on a smallish scale) or onto the commercial entity (if option #2). What I really want is the XO-1 in the hands of a generation of kids - and not just a hundred thousand geeks - how can we make this happen?

Whats standing in the way? Are there patents or other intellectual property issues that could be stumbling blocks for getting 3rd parties involved? Is it simply because nobody has asked?

Enthusiastically waiting for your response...

                                                  - A Happy XO-1 Dad

Update (1/6/07 10:32pm PST): It appears that Mary Lou Jepsen, the former CTO of OLPC, is actually trying to commercialize the OLPC technology in a beneficial way (as a $75 laptop!). The second half of this post by Charbax also mentions others who've had similar thoughts to what I discuss above