Open Source Analysis Model Takes Off- our first fork!

I was ego surfing this morning, checking out the new MSN search function. I came across some great stuff- RedMonk quoted in a news story hosted by the Iraqi Linux user group, for one. Nice website folks.

But the explosive moment for me came when i discovered RuleSphere had taken our Compliance Oriented Architecture model and run with it. We had some light contact with the firm recently, but no consulting, or otherwise, dollars changed hands.

The company decided to map its AEM Compliance Suite to our emerging COA model. And more importantly to extend the model. So check out RulesSphere’s own extended set of COA services… here. A good example of the kind of thinking is to say that XBRL is not an optional extra schema to handle, but is in fact a core compliance service. This is an interesting idea and one that i pointed to in this recent blog. What i like about XBRL is the potential for enforced transparency. That is, it addresses not just architecture of compliance, but more importantly culture of compliance. Culture is the only real driver for sustainable ethics–the rest is just ticklists. important ticklists you can go to jail for not filling, but ticklists nonetheles.

I am looking forward to the dialogue with RuleSphere and other firms. It might seem odd to celebrate a fork in the model so early, but the whole point about using a Creative Commons license was to enable this to happen. We wanted to see derivative works. I am certainly not going to complain now they have arrived. On the contrary i will be raising a glass tonight to a vendor that saw the potential of shared open intellectual property as the basis for a conversation with customers, partners and possibly even other analysts…

Cool. In order to make COA more open and useful we are going to start a wiki for it, to track changes and provide an Architecture of Participation, to start driving more conversations and semantics into the model. We had been holding off in order to find the “right” wiki platform. But that is the wrong approach. Best to get on with it. So watch this space.