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Vendor Relationship Management
Central Sign On is designed for storing information about people, but the general concept would also apply to storing information about businesses, or to making it easier for people to interact with businesses. The later idea is related to Vendor Relationship Mangement, a concept that is being studied by a group at Harvard.
The VRM Wiki page describes it as:
The goal of VRM is to improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter. It is to improve markets and their mechanisms by best equipping customers to play the role of independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply side of the marketplace.
Johannes Ernst also talks about the idea on his blog. Johannes gives this example:
With Vendor Relationship Management, you would construct an RFP saying what you want, put it somewhere (e.g. on your blog), and vendors would propose solutions to your problem.
Doc Searls seems to have kicked the VRM idea off with this post .
A user centered data server like Central Sign On could participate in VRM in a variety of ways:
Publishing a consumer’s RFP for a product.
Publishing preferences or past product purchases. This information would help a vendor select a product that the consumer might like.
Publishing other information required for a transaction, such a shipping addresses.