the Open Stack

The only way to inter-connect the disparate aspects our our digital lives is to have open standards that no one vendor owns or controls. That's what HTML and RSS are - and that's what we need to achieve open social networking.

A series of open standards is emerging which we refer to as the 'Open Stack'.  The combined functionality of these standards will provide a platform with a complete open solution for today's open web.

Broadband Mechanics has been supporting OpenID since 2007 and we plan on providing support for all of the elements of the Open Stack in 2009.

Broadband Mechanics has been contributing to the Open Stack and other open standards efforts for years.

We help put on the Data Sharing Summits - which are conferences and workshops dedicated to getting BigCo platforms together with smaller independent software developers.

We helped co-author the "Bill of Rights for users of Social Media".

We helped with the FOAF movement and co-created the FOAFnet effort to show off dataportability between disparate systems.

In the past we have participated in several ad hoc standards groups and mail lists such as: Identity Gang, media RSS, FOAFnet, ThreadsML, OpenEvents and OpenReviews. We have also created source code implementaions of certain open ideas - such as ourmedia.org and structuredblogging.org.

We have also helped created web service standards for routing content both into and out of blogging tools (ReDirectThis) and route to content to various content destinations (OutputThis.)

We continue to encourage and help others create open standards – in the fields of Attention, Tagging, VRM (virtual relationship marketing) and Digital Identity.

BBM is helping to create and promulgate open standards by not only building some of those standards, but also including and supporting them in all our product (PeopleAggregator) and services.  

We encourage all of our clients to support as many open standards as possible and our strategy has us bringing those clients into the open, distributed mesh which we’re participating in – as well.