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Scott Kveton

Husband, father, geek, pizza maker & bacon lover

Why I’m running for the OpenID Foundation BODDecember 15 2008

I’ve been on the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) board of directors since the organization was founded. I was also lucky enough to serve as the Chair over that time and I would love to continue to serve the community in some fashion on the board of directors again.

There have been several questions asked to the OpenID general mailing list and so I thought I would take the time to answer some (all?) of them here. I’m sure I’ve missed some so I’m sorry for that. If you have follow-up questions, feel free to post them here for me.

What would you have done differently if given the chance?

I’d love the benefit of hindsight but the reality is, I wouldn’t change a thing.

When I first got involved with OpenID it was because I had seen the benefits of how open source had affected traditional software and I saw some of those same themes being applied “up the stack” to OpenID. I was excited to see a simple, open effort to start tackling the issues of on-line identity. Back in 2006, there were still a lot of competing technologies in this space; XRI, Lid, Sxip, etc. It was quickly apparent that we needed to get to convergent on light-weight identity lest we miss a chance to build something great for the Internet. It took a few months but by the end of 2006 we had convergence and a small, focused community that had come together to develop and promote OpenID.

By this time we had a lot of the bigger companies out there looking at th

Announcing the Open Web FoundationJuly 24 2008

This morning on stage at OSCON, David Recordon announced the formation of the Open Web Foundation (OWF). I wanted to take a few minutes to say congrats to a fantastically diverse and committed bunch of people that have made this possible and tell a little bit about how it came to be.

In May 2008, the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) board had a face-to-face meeting at Google where we were planning for the next year. During that meeting we started to discuss focus and scope of the OIDF and realized that there was a much bigger need in the community of developers creating light-weight, open specifications for the web. Ironically, there were several other people visiting Google that day and over lunch, we hatched an idea that has finally been formalized today.

As a bit of history, when we created the OIDF, we learned quite a bit about what it takes for individuals and companies to come together within a community to develop and open specification. Out of this work, we developed a process for managing IP and copyrights as well as buil

Congrats to Chris MessinaJuly 23 2008

Tonight Chris Messina won a Google Open Source Award as “Best Community Amplifier” for his tireless work spreading “open” everywhere.

I’ve known Chris for several years now and its been an absolute pleasure not only to be in the same space but now I get to work with him at Vidoop on a daily basis.

Chris has been an inspiration to me and he truly personifies “open”; I don’t know anybody that has it running through their veins more than he does.

Congrats to you Chris. Its greatly deserved!

I’m for the Open WebJune 6 2008

I’ve been struggling with the relevance of Data Portability for the last few months now. The ideas around Data Portability have been a work-in-progress for several years; the technologies and communities building them are mature in every way. In this post, I want to try to explain my reasons for leaving the Data Portability project and why I think the Open Web is significantly more important.

I know when I was first introduced to Data Portability I was skeptical but when the ensuing media circus flooded the blogosphere, I had no choice but to jump right in. Many of the people developing the open protocols co-opted by the Data Portability project have hinted (both publicly and privately) at leaving. Others have just outright left.

I don’t have a problem with Data Portability as a whole as much as I do with its leader, Chris Saad. The lack of clarity of vision, the delusions of grandeur and blatant pandering are so frustrating to someone

Solutions: more than technologyMay 14 2008

When I first started using Open Source back in 1997 I thought for sure; this is the thing that’s going to change the world. And for the most part, that’s how it has played out. The software industry has been transformed because of the innovations of communities of people across the globe. This kind of collaboration had to move up the stack.

I discovered OpenID in February of 2006 and I knew it was the seed of something fantastic. Collaborative software development had given us the operating system, desktop applications and pretty soon we were starting to talk about the implications of the Open Web.

The Open Web was a nebulous concept but once the realization became that it was about the data, things really started to make sense. After the data was in the cloud, a whole host of issues arise on how to describe, share and control that data. There were missteps and half-attempts at how to do it and even today we’ve got some of the biggest players on the Internet “opening up”, but really only part-of-the-way.

It dawned on me in early 2007 that we needed to do something more if OpenID was going to take off. People weren’t going to the Internet saying “Please give me OpenID!!” Users want things that work. Users want solutions. OpenID is a fantastic technology, but the reality is, my mom got email, she didn’t get SMTP. The same will be true of OpenID.

I didn’t realize that as we moved up the stack, so too would the complex