Building the digital commons is a tricky thing.

It’s not all that different from doing a startup. If you’re at the right time, people are telling you you’re crazy. People have failed at your task. Big companies have yanked projects. The market isn’t ready.

But that’s when you have to build.

Because once a market gels, inserting competition from the open is very difficult. See: Diaspora. It is far better to ensure from the get-go that credible competition exists from the open source side, so that the entire market is affected by the credible threat that customers can bolt to open source, open data, open content, open systems.

I would argue we’re at this point in the personal data revolution. We’re awash in devices that collect data, which will look paleolithic in five years. We’re on the edge of ubiquitous electronic health records for everyone, which will actually start to be useful in five years. We’re already at the $1000 genome, which will be $100 in five years.

It’s easy to say, just wait. After all, Google exited the health records business. None of the big players in personal genomics or health has more than 150,000 total users (I don’t have a link, but this is what I’ve been told by management at a variety of companies) and a tiny fraction of those actually log in each month. Don’t plant the tree yet. Wait til the ground’s ready.

Now is the time to build a commons out of our personal data. Not in five years. In five years, the walled gardens will be so big most people won’t notice the walls. But walled gardens don’t lead to the kind of innovation we need. They lead to monopolistic, bullying behavior when the walled garden needs to hit quarterly results.

It’s not about shutting down the companies. It’s about changing the overall composition of the market’s ecosystem through openness.

Openness means that the non open players have to treat us better, because then we have an option to simply leave. Openness in web browsers and web servers changes the closed browsers and closed servers, in ways that we don’t have in social and mobile (despite the promise of android, it’s faux-pen, not open).

Now’s the time to plant the trees in personal health data.