Last year I attended the Federated Social Web Summit convened by Evan Prodromou the weekend before the Open Source Convention in Portland. He did an amazing job of bringing together a set of real projects from around the world that held pieces of the puzzle to create a distributed, user-centric, network of social sites where individuals can connect and share across them. He put forward a proposed stack of open protocols that could be used to do this OStatus – he also included other potential solutions like OneSocialWeb (based on XMPP), Project Danube (was at the time Nori) – XRI/XDI, SIOC – Semantically Linked Online communities.
The primary outcome of the event was the creation of the SWAT0 test to implement key aspects of the idea of the federated social web in real code:
There are two users on two different code bases following each other. User one posts a photo to their social site and user two on their own social site sees this photo flow past in a stream of activities from their “friends” they comment on the photo (on site 2) this comment then flows back to where the original photo was posted and is seen by the user posting. All of this could be public.
Several code bases achieved the goal.
The W3C began a social web incubator group 2009 and met weekly via conference call for over a year interviewing key leaders and innovators to understand the range of activities ongoing in this space. They wrote a final report that can be found here.
Working with the momentum around these efforts and seeking to be more inclusive the W3C opened itself up for these efforts to move forward and founded a community group.
This year they convened the Federated Social Web Summit, Europe to reflect on progress over the past year and to look ahead. They choose to spend half the time presenting from the position papers submission and half the time using Open Space Technology a method to make the agenda live at the event. It supports self organizing to move real work forward – agenda and notes here. I volunteered to help facilitate the open space.
A diverse range of projects represented at the event – more to follow about some of then in future posts.