With much fanfare and dancing bears, we’re announcing a new virtual team at matchmine that’s focused on issues related to being open. Yup, that’s right, we’ve talked a lot about our view that data should be free to roam the digital plains and now we’re letting folks know we’re walking the walk.

We’ve pulled together some of the folks in the ‘mine to tackle some of the complexity covered by the broad stroke of data portability. First and foremost, of course, is our ongoing commitment to being user centric. Inherent in that approach is the need for us to provide the user with transparent control over their media preferences and how they’re to be used. Interestingly, the past year has shown that people dig the vision we’ve been laying down and are actively embracing the “share-and-learn” model upon which we’ve built our platform.

As an active member in the DataPortability Project, I’m often asked about matchmine’s position on the technologies the group is evaluating. And while this post is kinda’ vague on details, I wanted to publicly (get the openness theme here?) let the community know we’re on the ball. Among the initiatives under way are:

• Plumbing the KeyFeeder so your MatchKey media preferences will feed off of your other public lifestream feeds.
• Working out the OpenID details so you won’t need yet another login to manage your MatchKey experience.
• Developing KeyStreams so you can take your media preferences and mash them up (or mesh them up, if you’re Kingsley Idehen) with your other services.

As many in the extended DataPortability / SemWeb / LinkedData communities already know, I’m also cooking up a couple open standards ideas… but they’re much further out than these. If all goes according to plan, you should see tangible output of the matchmine Ministry of Openness by the middle of the summer. Follow my tweets if you’re interested in the play-by-play (mixed in with the standard micro-posting nonsense).

By the way, I’m not sure I like it, but I’ve been dubbed the “Ministry of Openness Czar”. In our indomitable need to turn everything into an incomprehensible acronym, I wonder if this means I need to add MoOC to my LinkedIn profile.