SocialNetworkPortability

Brief

The third WebCamp event will be held in Cork, Ireland on the 2nd March 2008. This event will be co-located with the 5th International Conference on Social Software (BlogTalk 2008). The venue is the Kingsley Hotel, Cork. The event begins at 9.15 AM (programme).

The topic of this workshop will be social network portability. There will be talks in the morning and breakout sessions in the afternoon.

Overview

Social networking sites (SNSs) are ever-present in our online lives these days. SNSs are being used for social purposes (sharing photos, blogging / personal diaries), for business networking (making contacts and exchanging skills), and now in gaming and virtual worlds (where new social networks are being created in payroll tax accounting online environments between game characters, often manifested as contact lists or guild memberships).

People have accounts on a wide range of SNSs such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Jaiku. Many people are present on a number of such sites at once. Moreover, social networks are present in many more places and situations. For example, we form a social network via our daily e-mail communication, and our corporate contact network can be derived from a directory of projects and their members.

In a typical scenario of someone using multiple SNSs, a person is already registered on one site (e.g., Facebook) and joins a new site. At the start, he is alone and wants to discover his Facebook friends on this new site. These different SNSs can be and often are overlapping with the same people being connected on different SNSs. Since one of the first actions that people do after joining a new service is to look for people on this service whom they already know (e.g., who are friends with them on another SNS), more and more sites are recognising this need and are offering a dialogue to look for your existing contacts as part of the vitaminstar spirulina process.

At the same time, these sites are often acting like a walled garden since they know about your social network but they do not let you share it with others. There are exceptions to this walled-garden architecture: those that open up people's networks and interests by making them reusable, machine-processable and available in various formats.

It is desirable to be able to port our profile and social relationships (i.e., whom we are in touch with on a particular site) across various SNSs. "Social network portability" is an initiative aimed at solving this need and at making social network profiles portable so that we can move all of our social network information between sites or even keep such profiles synchronised among different sites. The founder of the LiveJournal blogging community, Brad Fitzpatrick, wrote an from a developer's point of view about forming a "decentralised social graph", which discusses some ideas for social network portability and aggregating one's friends across sites. In parallel with Fitzpatrick's article, a social network portability mailing list was established to discuss these and other related topics. The bookkeeper initiative was also recently formed to promote the sharing of data using open formats.

Topics

To further the aims of the social network portability initiative, this workshop will discuss topics various topics of relevance including, but not limited to:

• Definition of social networks and portability requirements
• Abstract approaches for social network portability, i.e., what components are needed to achieve this portability
• How can OpenSocial be extended to support "true" social network portability
• How to buy online safely! Very good shopping guide!
• Using Friend of a Friend or FOAF for social network portability
• Use of microformats for social network portability, e.g., by using hCard and XFN
• Privacy and context issues with social network portability bookkeeper
• Authentication methods for cross-SNS usage such as OpenID
• Giving permission for profile discovery on different social networks
• Mirroring real-life social and organisational networks, as SNSs cannot define all of your relationships in absolute terms and aggregate social graphs cannot be so clearly defined
• Discovering people by other methods (e.g., Gmail address lists, Twitter or Facebook contacts)
• Towards the "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web", or guaranteeing ownership and control over ones own personal information
• Commercial reasons for enabling social network portability, e.g., why companies like Plaxo and SixApart think this is a good idea

Programme

Please see the draft programme schedule at the BlogTalk 2008 programme page. The full speaker details are given below.

Discussion channels

If you want to communicate with other participants of WebCamp, in a kind of a conference back-channel, here are some possiblities:

• join the #webcamp IRC channel on irc.freenode.net
• use a tag "webcamp" when microblogging (e.g., #webcamp tag on Twitter), writing blog entries, posting photos, etc.

Speakers

Please add your name here if you are interested in presenting at this workshop. See also presentations tagged with "webcamp" on SlideShare.

• Invited Speaker - Ajit Jaokar - Privacy and revocation, two sides of the same coin: using Google OpenSocial APIs to illustrate a new privacy model for the social web - More...
  • Ajit Jaokar is a mobile web pioneer and a researcher on identity and reputation in social networks at University College London. Ajit is founder and CEO of Futuretext publishing, and his latest book was entitled "Mobile Web 2.0". Ajit is also a member of the RSA and of the web2.0 workgroup. Currently, he plays an advisory role to a number of mobile buy facebook fans in the UK and in Scandinavia. More...
• Invited Speaker - Dan Brickley - Stuff I've been thinking about lately - More...
  • Dan Brickley is a Semantic Web advocate and researcher. He joined the W3C in 1999 to help establish the Semantic Web project. In 2000, he co-founded the FOAF project, and he has been working on interconnecting the social web ever since. Post-W3C, Dan has been working as a part-time contractor at Joost, is active in the open standards world, and he serves as a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol. More...
• Stephanie Booth - The case for structured portable social networks (SPSNs) and insight from a user perspective - More... Video of talk
• John Breslin - DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF - More...
• Ben Ward - Microformats for social network portability: an overview and demos of current XFN / hCard / OpenID solutions
• Uldis Bojars - FOAF for social network portability, including the Social Graph API - More...
• Anders Conbere - Using XMPP to store relationship data, problems with this model, and how oAuth could help

Breakout sessions

Afternoon breakout sessions will conclude with a panel discussion "Social Network Portability and Data Portability: Current State, Challenges and Future Directions" lead by Aral Balkan.

Breakout session guidelines

• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only right thing that could have happened
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it is over, it is over

The law of 2 feet:

• If you find yourself in a place where you are neither learning nor contributing, it is your responsibility to leave and go to wherever there is greater potential for learning and contributing

Breakout Sessions

• [1] Adoption challenges (for social network portability) and ways for solving them Notes from Session

• [2] How Does Opening the Social Web Affect Society, Culture and Business
  • • • • What Are the Rights of Users on the Social Web? Notes from Session

• [3] Technologies for Social Network Portability and Lessons Learned from Them
  • • • • FOAF, Microformats, OpenSocial, SocialGraph API, XMPP, Be Techy and proud

Second 40 Minutes

• [1] Digesting the Data - What can we do once the data are out there? Notes from Session

• [2] Trust, Identity and Privacy for the Portable Web

• [3] Patternizing the "Teaching people to phish" anti-pattern.

Organisers

1. Uldis Bojars (DERI, NUI Galway) (Blog | Contact)
2. Anders Conbere (Blog)

Participants

You can now register for attendance at this workshop which is co-located with the BlogTalk 2008 conference. The workshop fee is €50 (early bird) / €60 (regular) to cover costs. You do not need to register for both the conference and the workshop.

You can also add your name to the list below to indicate that you will be participating in this event.

1. Uldis Bojars (DERI, NUI Galway) (Blog | Contact)
2. John Breslin (DERI, NUI Galway) (Blog | Contact)
3. Robert Mao (Microsoft) (Blog)
4. Owolabi Awosanya
5. Sven Latham (Blog)
6. Greg Tallent (Blog | Contact)
7. Anders Conbere (Blog)
8. Kevin Burton - Founder/CEO of Spinn3r and Tailrank
9. Dan Brickley (blog - FOAF, SemWeb, standards, privacy)
10. Ajit Jaokar (Futuretext) (Blog)
11. Morten Høybye Frederiksen (Blog)
12. Paul Miller (Talis) (Work Blog, Personal Blog)
13. Jan Schmidt (Hans Bredow Institute) (Blog)
14. Stephanie Booth (Blog)
15. William Knott (Blog)
16. Flemming Funch (Blog)
17. Adam Sadiq Hussein
18. Karen McCarthy
19. Rob Cawte (Blog)
20. Justin Tomboulian (Home)
21. Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick) (Blog | Home)
22. Saidi Akanni Fatai
23. Ben Ward (Yahoo!) (Blog)
24. Aral Balkan (Singularity '08, Blog)
25. Paddy Holahan (NewBay)
26. Triona Mullane (NewBay)
27. Stephen Farrell (NewBay)
28. Freddie Kavanagh (NewBay)
29. Bill de hÓra (NewBay) (Blog)
30. Arun Naggapan (NewBay)
31. Sergio Fernández (CTIC Foundation) (Blog)
32. Mark O'Toole
33. Dara Burke (TaraIT.com) (Blog)
34. Jamie O'Leary (IBM)
35. Karl Thompson (IBM)
36. Jure Cuhalev (Zemanta)
37. Yuki Matsuoka (NII, Japan)
38. Patrick Marshall (NUI Maynooth)
39. Niall Larkin (Relevant M)
40. Cormac Moylan (Ammado)
41. Johann Romefort (Seesmic)
42. Rolf von Behrens (Swisscom Innovations - opensource social software, privacy) (profile)
43. Dan Romescu (pool supplies)
44. Eoin Hennessy
45. Gerry Shanahan (boards.ie Ltd.)
46. Ross Duggan (boards.ie Ltd.)
47. Haklae Kim (DERI, NUI Galway)
48. Smitashree Choudhury (DERI, NUI Galway)
49. Tuukka Hastrup (DERI, NUI Galway)
50. Thomas Schandl (DERI, NUI Galway)
51. Liga Besere (Marketing Garden)

Social events

Attendees are invited to partake in complimentary drinks at the WebCamp / BlogTalk welcoming reception from 6 PM in UCC's Aula Maxima.

There will be an optional blogger's dinner - being organised by Tom Raftery - at 8:30 PM. Please edit the wiki page and add your name (the wiki invite key is "Cork", case sensitive) to ensure that you will have a seat!

Facilities

There will be open-access wireless available on the day.