We haven't been hibernating. Well... my blog-writing mojo might have been, but there has been a huge frenzy of stuff quietly going on. But now I have woken my fingers, persuaded a malevolent part of my subconscious not to title this entry "Hub-by New Year", and I want to write a bit about where we are at the start of 2015 and what we can expect from the coming year.
As ever the intense focus is on development, and the team is now really moving at speed, with many technical milestones being met and passed. We were finding the language of "alpha" and "beta" a bit constraining - they felt like big and widely spread, rather arbitary, moments in time.
So you shouldn't expect to hear much about them from now on. Instead you should expect to hear about real things happening.
The first actual live services incorporating elements of Hub technology will be launching in the next few weeks, and we expect others to follow over the next few months. They're not built on "alpha" or "beta" technology specifically; they're things which we're ready to help launch and so we are. This seems like a better way of doing this to us.
These will be the first "use cases" to go live, and the pipeline of other use cases is getting ever-longer - we're up to 52 as I write this and we're adding to that number every week.
They come from across industry sectors, from organisations ranging from one to thousands of employees and from commercial and non-commercial players too across a number of countries. A really great spread of ideas all of which we hope to be able to help to launch along with the others which cropping up all the time.
As we reach this first stage of the vision turning into reality we have also focused a lot of energy on other, non-technical, questions.
We're thinking about governance which raises some very interesting, critical, questions.
We're thinking ahead to the time - hopefully later this year - when we will be able to release some of our software and start building a community of developers and users.
We're thinking about future funding and our international community of users, developers and partners too.
Plus, of course, the subject of copyright is never far from the thoughts of governments and legislators, in the context of the internet. Many of our stakeholders are therefore thinking about it too, and the Copyright Hub can play a role in inviting everyone to consider how the questions and answers might change in an internet where content and its owners are better connected and where seeking and getting permission is a matter of a few clicks.
It's becoming real very soon now. So now is a great time to be talking to us, thinking about how you can use our work yourself, and how we can help you bring new capabilities to your business, your country or your project.
Oh yes, if you haven't watched our little video, you should. We'll be doing more of those too...