About Dazzle Labs Inc.

/about/

At Dazzle Labs Inc., we believe in the power of technology to make lives better, to find, use and create new knowledge, and to bring people together for the benefit of everybody.

Unfortunately, much technology on the market today has different objectives, such as making a platform overlord as powerful as possible so they can extract as much rent from everybody else as possible.

So we figured, we might as well try to do something about that. Not only will it be good for humanity, but there is a substantial business opportunity to deliver products and services that place the needs of the customer first instead. (What a concept!) No exploitation, but problem solving. No manipulation, but respect. No bullying, but spaces that are safe.

Our goals are:

to build and distribute products that are demonstrably trustworthy and not manipulative;
to empower people to assert control over their data, their identity and their privacy, and to give them the means to communicate with others of their choice freely and safely;
to remove the need for the middle man in many interactions, such as social media. If there is no middle man, they can’t manipulate the conversation to the detriment of everybody else. Everybody will be happier.

Collaborations

We can’t do that alone. So we contribute, collaborate and integrate. Some of our partners and projects in which we participate:

	The Social Web Community Group in the World-Wide-Web Consortium (W3C), which shepherds the open ActivityPub and ActivityStreams standards that power the Fediverse.
	FediForum is the leading event that "brings together the people who move the Fediverse forward".
	The Fediverse Developer Network, which connects developers from many different Fediverse projects for mutual learning and problem solving.
	The Feditest test framework and test suite to test the interoperability of federated protocols such as those powering the Fediverse.

People

Johannes Ernst is the founder and principal of Dazzle Labs Inc. He has been working on the technologies that evolved into today’s Fediverse, and their governance seemingly forever, and since long before the term Fediverse was coined.

In 2004, he invented the first user-centric digital identity scheme for the web, called Light-Weight Identity (LID). He was a founding director of the OpenID Foundation which now oversees the world’s most-widely deployed federated identity protocol. He led or contributed to distributed technology standards including the Object Management Group, the Electronic Industries Association and OpenID, founded or helped found industry efforts such as Open-Source Identity Systems (OSIS), Real-time Analysis and Design (RTAD in the OMG), FediForum, the Fediverse Developer Network, Internet Safety Labs, and Project App Assay for COVID-19.

He started his first company facilitating distributed engineering during the dot-com bubble, and since has delivered commercial solutions in markets as diverse as mobile health care, energy, Internet-of-Things (IoT), identity-as-a-service, personal cloud hosting and personal servers.

He is soo excited that now, in the 2020’s, there is so much momentum behind the pendulum swinging back from centralization to putting the user back in control. It took a while, but here we are. What shall we do with this opportunity? What great things can we do together?