Brandslang faces three separate major challenges: Technical Implementation, User Experience and canonical data model.
Technical Implementation
This is going to be the most straight forward. Most of what will ship with Brandslang is already delivered with ActiveMQ/Camel. I don’t want to trivialize the challenges here, but we are standing on the shoulders of some mighty tall giants. Essentially, we’re endeavoring to set up a somewhat self-configuring federated network of brokers. There is going to need to be some way of back-channel configuring different destinations in order for these networks which presumably know nothing about each other to securely exchange messages according to privacy preferences. Also included here are going to be some number of adapters which ship with Brandslang. I’m sure Twitter, Facebook, Google Health/Spreadsheet/Base/etc, and countless others.
Open Question: Is a generic data sink required in order to achieve Brandslang privacy goals including sending “anonymized” aggregate data? My thoughts, yes.
User Experience
If Mom can’t figure it out, we have an uphill battle. How much of the complexity needs to be hidden and how much of it needs to be presented in a simplified manner is a huge challenge. How are we going to get the general public to grok public key encryption, digital signing, data aggregation, anonymizing techniques, etc and implement them according to their preferences. I think this is possibly the most interesting space, and the space I’m least personally prepared to address.
Canonical Data Model
Realistically, we’re going to need to leverage a common data model wherever possible. The goal should be to adopt an existing open standard where it makes sense and to create simple, open standards where none exist. This is by far the largest challenge faced in the enterprise implementation of this sort of thing. And if it’s hard to get a few knuckleheads all working for the same company to decide on this sort of thing, I can only imagine what it’ll be like with the entire world weighing in. This is the largest opportunity for failure, largest opportunity for special-interest interference and quite possibly the largest contribution Brandslang has to offer to the world. A common language against which to write the Rosetta Stone for the worlds data.
Tags: Brandslang, data, quantifiedself