Today, Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington released A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, calling for services to support a more open approach to identity information. The document is simple and effective:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Jeder der meine Session auf dem Barcamp in Köln besucht haben sollte, weiss dass es ziemlich genau um diese Punkt ging. Würde mich natürlich freuen, wenn auch in der deutschen Blogosphäre dieses Thema stärker diskutiert wird und sich vor allem noch Leute finden, die das Noserub Projekt von Dirk Olbertz unterstützen, welches in die gleiche Richtung arbeitet.

Nachtrag: Ich reiche das jetzt mal weiter … los hopp … Open Social Web … Herr Basic, Frau Simon, Herr Breitenbach, Herr Eck, Herr Sixtus, Herr Keil, Herr Lumma, Frau Moritz, Herr Olbertz, Herr Breuer, Franz … und wer sich noch immer davon angesprochen fühlen mag … weitersagen!