Practical Portability

The most difficult questions surrounding DataPortability are currently those of understanding.

How do you explain to an end-user what DataPortability is, why they might want it, and where they might get it?
How do you explain to a developer what DataPortability is, why they might want it, and how they might achieve it?

Developers learn most effectively by developing something. Users learn most effectively by using something.

For this reason we see the most effective way of promoting an understanding of DataPortability as providing developers something to develop that we know users will use.

To this end, we will be setting ourselves a real development target, one that should satisfy both developer and user alike. We will be developing the middleware required to create a single application suite from a mix of open source solutions - using the DataPortability Technical Blueprint as our guide.

Learning to develop for DataPortability without prior experience is difficult though. Its initially a pretty steep learning curve, and comes with it’s own set of questions.

Where do you find reference implementations, and who’ll walk you through them?
Where do you find books and training materials on DataPortability implementation?
Who’ll help you with your own project?

Without answering these questions, you provide understanding for only the privileged few.

We hope to provide something more, a path that anyone can take, an introduction to coding for DataPortability - a DataPortability for dummies.

Because of this Practical Portability will be made up of two equally important pieces:

1. the leading edge work of collaborating on existing reference implementations, or building them where they do not yet exist (the traditional open source piece).
2. the follow-up work of turning the reference implementations into training materials, classes etc (the less traditional open learning piece)

Basically, we will pull together a reference implementation in collaboration with others doing the same thing, and then use the reference implementation as a syllabus for training up developers looking to learn about DataPortability.

It’s a little unusual in nature, but something very worthwhile, and something I for one am excited to be a part of.

The decision has been a while coming, but we are finally launching our very own open source project. We are taking everything we have learned over the last 12 months and using it as the basis of an open source application suite which will be freely distributed to anyone wanting to use it.

We are looking for thinkers, watchers, designers, developers, and testers who have something to contribute.

We don’t need long term commitment. If you don’t like what we are doing, or feel we have missed the point, just tell us. thats it. It helps, and if you do nothing else you’ve helped drive the project forward a little further. Comment on the blog, delete something you don’t like from the wiki, speak out in the forums, whatever… We will appreciate it.

The site was set up 2 days ago. We have no logo yet or consistent design across our tools, the paint is still drying on the content, and we have not yet uploaded any code, but get involved now and you can help us drive…