It was great to see Data Liberation Front announcing their goal to liberate data from the mighty Google silo about two weeks ago. They have been around in a more geeky form for some time as an open-source Blog Converters project for federating the exchange of data between blogging platforms… and one of the reasons I went for MINT rather than a name with data liberation in it.

I particularly liked this bit:

We believe that users – not products – own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We’d rather have loyal users who use Google products because they’re innovative – not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave.

This is unreservedly good news. Exporting your data ought to be part of basic functionality of any web app, web service or web platform. The fact it isn’t means it needs to be fought on many fronts. People’s Font for Data Liberation, anyone?

Instead of painting the palace walls, how about helping with finding:

* executives in a position to tweak their organisations database to provide downloadable transaction/purchase history to their customers or users OR anyone who think they might know someone.
* data-geeks with understanding of open formats and/or database data exports.
* developers interested in providing users with analytical functionality and ability to mine their own data

Bonus link (thanks Johnnie!): Let My Data Go! by Brian Fitzpatrick

Cross-posted from the VRM Hub

Last night’s VRM Hub was full house, with two visitors from out of town – the VRM Godfather Doc Searls and Mathias Baert from Belgium – half a dozen new people and great conversations in a pub afterwards. At the main session we talked about a new project called MINT:

MINT initiative was set up to ‘liberate customer data’* from company systems and organisational silos. We assist organisations that directly interact with customers or users, and retain data about transactions, to make purchase history data available to download at no charge, in open formats and fit for further use. The targeted organisations include, but are not limited to, retailers, utililties, telecommunications, public sector etc.

MINT recommends the following formats for customer’s purchase history data export: CSV, XML or JSON, Atom. We advise and provide technical implementation to those organisations that require it. Where there is human readable data, it ought to be machine readable for futher analysis and added value. Where there is machine readable data, it ought to be human readable for comprehension and accessibility.

MINT stands for ‘My Information, Not Theirs’ and is a market RIOT initiative, a movement to redress the balance of market power between vendors and customers, institutions and individuals, web services/platforms and users. MINT is based in the UK but will work with organisations located anywhere, whenever practically possible.

The MINT initiative is open to anyone wishing to have their data liberated from closed platforms and silos and falls into one of the following categories:

• somebody in a position to tweak their organisations database to provide downloadable transaction/purchase history to their customers or users OR anyone who think they might know someone.
• a data-geek with understanding of open formats and/or database data exports.
• a developer interested in providing users with analytical functionality and ability to mine their own data

The next VRM Hub will be on Thursday October 29, speaker to be announced and sign-up page published shortly.

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*Note: Alas, the Data Liberation Front had already been taken at the time of the MINT idea but not until very recently it has also sprung to action. Excellent news and hope this will be a decent snowball. I suppose we could always be the People’s Front for Data Liberation…