Tuesday I had to register DG for high school. I spent two days putting together the materials — a six-page enrollment form, vaccination records, utility bill proving residence, copy of her birth certificate, then the horrible process of figuring out four years worth of class schedules, because at this school, it’s expected that your child’s career path will be known from birth so that they are properly tracked for all academics and electives in high school.

Good luck with that. We still haven’t finished.

I arrived at the school on Tuesday night, ‘packet of doom’* in hand. And I waited. And waited. You can even see the timeline of waiting on my Twitter timeline for Tuesday, because I was so bored, aggravated and tired of waiting that I twittered everyone’s ear off. After 2 hours or so, I finally got to hand in my packet. Yes, that’s all. I waited in line for 2 hours to hand in my packet. Then they sent me to another 2-hour line for the school nurse to sign off on the vaccination record. Patience exhausted, I bailed out of that line and told them I’d bring it back later in the week when things weren’t quite so crowded.

The whole time I stood in line, one question rolled around in my head until it was close to exploding.

“Why can’t these records simply be electronically transferred from her current school to the high school?”

I answered the same questions, provided the same birth certificate, showed the same vaccination record. These were all acceptable documents for her admission into elementary and middle school, so why did I have to reproduce them yet again for the high school?

It should have been as simple as reviewing the data on file, updating contact information if necessary, and signing a consent form to move my daughter’s data from one school to the next via electronic transfer. Or transferring it myself.

When she applies to colleges in four years, it should be as simple as instructing the school to transfer her transcript electronically to her colleges of choice along with SAT, AP, and ACT scores.

Portable Packets. Not just for school enrollment. Social networks. Medical records. Job applications. This was the topic of yesterday’s NewsGang Live — a great discussion with Steve Gillmor, Mary Hodder, Chris Saad, Robert Anderson and Matt Terenzio and me, though for this show I listened far more than I spoke.

It’s a fascinating discussion with lots of questions and intersections. If we own our data, do we control it? How do we control it? In the school discussion, I specifically added the “sign consent forms” phrase, because I believe that I own my daughter’s data as her parent, and I have the right to control what data is transferred to the high school. Should electronic data be injected with “reverse DRM” , built-in electronic consent to use that data but not own it? What about medical records, which we surely do not own at this point in time anyway. Our doctors and insurance companies have more rights to our medical records than we do, though I strongly disagree with that antique and idiotic philosophy.

Is there any reason to have to hunt down a little booklet with handwritten verification that vaccinations have been administered when it could be as simple as having a packet of stored electronic data which I can release to the school upon enrollment? It seems like a waste of money and time to have to produce the booklet so that it can be photocopied and attached to a paper file which someone then has to file by hand and pull out from the file drawer by hand to hand-file updates.

What came out of today’s discussion was much food for thought around how our little packets of doom can be moved around the Internet, in and out of different sites at our behest with our consent and without losing our control over the data or giving ownership to anyone else. Wholesale government internet-watching notwithstanding (see the FISA posts over on the other blog for more info), I want to be able to create a “packet” of information about me, my social networks, my vital information, etc. that I own and control — a packet that can be shared in part or whole by social networks, or schools, or health providers at my behest.

To me, this is the foundation of Web 3.0. Not the semantic web, not search, not cool widgets or Twitter clones. A way to create my own packet of personal data, which is portable across different aspects of my life and my web participation, where I control which data is given and how it’s used.

If you want a glimpse of the web of tomorrow, give the show a listen. There were some incredibly brilliant minds working together toward solutions.

* the term is a nod to QueenofSpain’s excellent description of her kindergarten enrollment packet

Technorati Tags: packets, portability, web 3.0, data, ownership, social networks, digital footprint