Howdy folks!

If you'd like to help coordinate promotion for our second Kickstarter effort, please email me at joe@andrieu.net. We'll be launching relatively soon and I'd like to sync up with our allies out there to give us as much juice as we can.

Since the last update, we've been hard at work improving the Label and building a browser addon for Chrome that can display it for any website you visit.  I demo'd the addon at the 2012 Cloud Identity Summit yesterday (Thursday July 19) and was quite happy with how it went. =)

The code is currently available in the summit-demo branch on GitHub at 

https://github.com/dmvaldman/Standard-Label/tree/summit-demo

There isn't much in the way of documentation, but it's out there. =) We'll be moving this to a different repository soon and providing a bit more documentation and licensing details (it'll be some form of open source). Since we're doing this as open as possible, I wanted you, our backers, to be the first to hear that a (minimally functional) version of the addon is available for tech-minded developers.

More as it happens.  Please let me know (joe@andrieu.net) if you'd like to help promote the second attempt with Kickstarter.

Hi!

We're at the Santa Barbara Startup Weekend working on a browser plugin for The Label.  Please take a moment and fill out our product development survey:

http://standardlabel.org/survey.html

You'll also be able to see the second use of The Label in the wild.  A huge learning curve putting these together, with lots of ideas for improving the specification.

Please tell your friends, too!

Thanks!

Not nearly enough...

Unless a miracle occurs in the final minutes, we aren't going to reach our goal. And since I'm not sure if we can send out updates after the project fails to reach its goal, I wanted to send a quick note out to all of you.

This has been an incredible experience.  The community rallied to support our work, and even though we didn't get enough traction to get the funding this time, we got great engagement, great feedback, and excellent progress towards our ultimate goal: a simpler, more user-driven World Wide Web.

The project itself made us rethink our assumptions about the work at the Information Sharing Work Group and distill the core value in the very front part of that effort: The Standard Information Sharing Label.  That shift in focus allowed us to realize that the Label works all by itself... even without the sophisticated legal framework we had been working on in the ISWG conversation.

Thank you for catalyzing that. We now have a draft spec and an actionable tool that we can evolve to work for websites everywhere.

We welcome you all to join our work group and help with that effort. Participation is free and open to the public. http://informationsharingworkgroup.org

As I mentioned in my last update, we have a lot of plans for how to keep the momentum going and take this work to the next level.

If you'd like to learn more, visit our temporary landing page at http://standardlabel.org/default.html and sign up for our mailing list or follow us on Twitter: @StandardLabel

Both of those will keep you up to date on our current work.

We'll be back!

Kickstarter is happy to let proposers try again if their first effort doesn't succeed. We got a lot of great feedback about how we could improve our project, both from a pure communications standpoint, and in more substantial ways, like demonstrating that websites will actually use the label.  Once we feel we've made substantial progress in these areas, we'll come back to Kickstarter and try again.

We're not done yet!

Thanks again for your help, your feedback, and your appreciation. We've got a lot of good work yet to do and we look forward to working with you as we make this project a success.

We'll talk with you soon!

Howdy folks!

First, thanks to everyone who has already backed us!  We're nearly half way there, thanks in large part to a $2500 contribution from Ping Identity.

And that's exactly what we need to make this work.

If you, or someone you know, is in a leadership position at a company in this space, please make the call and put some cash into the project.

In addition to the work we're committed to in the $12,500 budget, we have a number of next steps, largely inspired by the feedback and engagement of our supporters.

• 1. Complete the specification, with machine readability
• 2. A petition drive to rally end-user support to get companies to use the label
• 3. A pledge drive to get websites to pledge to use the label once completed
• 4. A universal browser plugin for displaying Labels at any website, using any Label authority. Open source and fully configurable by the end-user.
• 5. A crowd-sourced Label authority to build a Label database for the most popular websites
• 6. A How-To guide to help websites adopt the Label

All of this will be open and collaborative, working through the Information Sharing Work Group at Kantara Initiative.

One last reminder: the revenue from this Kickstarter will go directly to outside talent to deliver the graphic design and the promotional video. The rest of the work continues to be led by volunteers.

Less than 12 hours left!

We have received lots of great feedback on our initial specification, from IIW, PII, and direct from backers and supporters. Based on that feedback, we've updated the specification to include several new terms:

• Where
• Contact
• Author
• Redistribution
• Revocation
• Access

We've got just about 32 hours left in this fundraiser!  If you're considering backing this effort, now is the time. If we don't raise another $9,288 in the next 32 hours, none of the current funds will go towards our work.

Please tell your friends, call in favors, and help us get over the hump!