Here’s my intro to PDEC, the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, I gave at the Federated Social Web Summit in October 2012.
My speaker notes:
Hi! I’m Phil Wolff. This is me looking all serious inside of a Cray supercomputer in the Computer History Museum.
I work for PDEC, the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. We’re a trade association, a consortium, of companies building a personal data ecosystem.
As of November 2012 we have about 40 members. They are at different stages, from garage to angel funded to venture-backed.
About one-third are in Silicon Valley, a third in the rest of the US, and a third in Europe. Most are private businesses, but some are not-for-profit projects. Some are open source.
They fall into two broad buckets. One group operates user-facing services where they hold data for customers and help them put it to use, like Personal and Privo. The other provides infrastructure, helping the first group execute well, like Singly.
Both groups hold two values at their core: (1). We believe in user-centricity. This means people should be at the center of design, experience, and have control over personal data usage you’d associate with ownership. (2) And we believe that personal control over personal data is good for users and for the ecosystem. Our community is committing to both of those ideas.
As an association, PDEC serves our members three ways.
First, we’re advocates. We pay attention to what US and European governments are doing about identity and personal data so you don’t have to. We reach out to the news media and press to create awareness of the ecosystem and its members, resulting in stories in major newspapers, blogs, and social media.
Second, we’re creating community within the ecosystem. We co-host events like the Internet Identity Workshop (we just completed the 15th one) and set up face-to-face meetings at conferences from Berlin to Beijing. We have backchannels including listservs and group dinners.
PDEC’s third service is education. Our members don’t need much but we’ve been holding one day investor briefings to explain the segment and introduce our members. And we’re offering two-day enterprise workshops that help large holders of personal data build their roadmap to personal control over personal data.
Because we’re at the center of so many thought leaders, we’ve started publishing. We’re launching the Personal Data Standards Digest in January 2012, to boil down the important technical work from 150 working groups and standards bodies. And we’ve been publishing the Personal Data Journal – a magazine for geeks, suits, and wonks – for a year, for our members and enterprise subscribers.
I spend half my time on education, including the Personal Data Journal. We present news on society signals, industry analysis, technology deep dives, standards and work from our startups.
Stories in our October issue included a forecast of sentiment analysis technologies and the potential for generating new forms of personal data.
We reported on real life identity in China’s cities (register your web session with your mobile phone) and covered the launch of a new browser-based protocol.
We reviewed a handbook for building your big data ethics strategy and introduced APIs from PDEC startups Personal and Azigo.
We’re a good group with a worthy cause. Feel free to ping me and introduce yourself. I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area and we always love talk shop and connecting people. Thanks!
About Phil Wolff