A Real Example of How oAuth Support Can Help Build a Better Political Transparency Movement
With a week until the next User Group Meeting, Freebase just released an upgrade to their Acre platform. The release notes include improvements to the editor and the APIs, but the most interesting release is oAuth support. Acre developers can now write information from other web services to Freebase, on behalf of users.
Big whoop, right? Maybe not. If you don’t think this is a big deal, perhaps you haven’t considered how this relates to President Barack Obama’s BlackBerry - the so-called BarackBerry.
According to the Chicago Tribune,
Obama sees the device as “a way of keeping in touch with folks, a way of doing it outside of getting stuck in a bubble.”
Fair enough, but the Presidential Records Act requires that all communication of “administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value” be kept on record. In clear opposition to the last Administration, Obama stated his first day in office that he intends to usher in an unprecedented level of transparency.
Let’s say that Obama has a Blackberry Account, a Gmail account, and a Yahoo account. Obama’s Blackberry account is for classified communications that would need to be encrypted by the NSA, his Gmail account is for all of his communications that would qualify as presidential correspondence and would need to be disclosed under the Presidential Records Act, and his Yahoo! account is reserved for personal contact with his family.
Here’s where we get back to the really interesting oAuth stuff. Imagine an application that would organize and store all of the President’s documents and emails in a public forum with a top-notch interface that would allow for discussions to be made on any item.
And imagine this application could be coded in an afternoon by one web developer of intermediate skill.
In case you’re not familiar with oAuth, the new Freebase oAuth docs offers a simple explanation:
The best metaphor to describe what OAuth does is the concept of a ‘valet key’: some fancy cars come with this notion of a valet key, a car key that you give to the guy at the restaurant that parks your car. This key allows the valet person to drive the car only for a certain distance, after which it shuts the car down and calls you. OAuth is basically a way to obtain and give your application a ‘valet key’ so that it can act on your behalf (like the valet driver) against some web service, instead of you having to give you the entire key (your username/password pair). Acre uses OAuth to obtain a ‘valet key’ for your app from Freebase and allow your app to write on Freebase on your behalf.
Driving the Presidential Limo a few blocks wouldn’t be so bad, right?
