contributors:

Organization Mission

The DataPortability Project is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

Philosophy

The DataPortability Project maintains:

• You should be able to decide what you do with that data and how it gets used by others
• Open Source solutions are preferred to closed source proprietary solutions
• Bottom-up distributed solutions are preferred to top down centralized solutions

Approach

The DataPortability Project seeks to foster these ideas by:

• Promoting the philosophy and data portability ethos in the marketplace
• Promoting the use of existing standards that enable data portability
• Encouraging the development of those standards in ways that facilitate data portability
• Engaging with individuals, services and standards bodies with similar views where their scope is relevant
• Identifying new standards that are required to fulfill the data portability vision
• Making the output of the DataPortability project freely available to anybody and everybody that wants to make use of it

Principles

The DataPortability Project intends:

• To be open to anyone, whether individuals, companies or organizations
• To reach resolution by consensus
• To have transparency in decisions
• To prefer collaboration of existing efforts over invention of new technologies

DataPortability.org Is Not

Some things that The DataPortability Project is not:

• We are not a group focused on creating new technologies. DataPortability intends to work with tools that already exist today.
• The group is primarily focused on consumer facing technologies and not those aimed at corporate internal use.
• We are not an organization that mandates single solutions. We recognize that there are multiple solutions and standards that can be used to create data portability.
• We are not going to push approaches that force data into the public that shouldn't be. The owner of the data should control what parts are made publicly available, to whom, and how they are used.
• A legal entity providing legal-level precision.