[p2p-research] Nathan RE: your email via facebook

[Samuel Rose]

Nathan,

Is it ok to repost your email to via facebook to this list?

I have a couple of questions that will help me prepare for coming to
this conference
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=63814529959&ref=ts :

1. What are the existing open source software platforms that are being
developed, or commonly used?  I am aware of
http://wiki.openkollab.com/Home (wagn) Media Wiki, GNU Mailman
listserv, WordPress, Drupal, and a few Prowiki and OddMuse wiki users
(Redmine is the basis of Open Pario for open source tech dev ). Any
others that I am missing there? Are people using Trac?

2. What are the commercial services being used among networks of
people interested in this discussion? I am aware of Google Groups,
Facebook, Twitter, Ning, identi.ca, Skype, FriendFeed? anything else?

3. most importantly, what are the existing open standards that are
usable among both open source platforms and commercial services? The
open source platforms are obviously potentially unlimited, so this
question is really about the commercial services.

4. Although, for open source frameworks and platforms, groupware,
applications, etc, We can look at how existing objects within
applications (like dates, identities, keywords, content objects, etc
etc) can be output in plural ways, under a diverse array of standard
output ways, to allow for wide re-use. This does not have to be done
by tedious extension of the native application. This is an overlooked
but extremely important design choice. The amount of effort that it
takes to extend an application that was not designed to do what you
are trying to do is exponentially more than creating the simple
mechanisms outside of the application, and giving the mechanisms
secure access to the data within the application. An example: Media
wiki was not originally designed to be a content recommendation engine
that works with K-means clustering algorithm. So, if you design this
functionality as a non-commercial service that lives outside of media
wiki, and adapters that let it read from and write back to media wiki,
the service is also available to potentially all other wiki engines as
well, and the amount of work to make it compatible with Media Wiki
software is far, far less than if the Media Wiki scripts themselves
have to do the heavy lifting and processing of the new functionality.
The external service need only be able to access data from media wiki
(either via a RESTful service or directly from the database) and to
write back to Media Wiki in a way that MW is expecting to see pages
and content (when it is deemed necessary to programmatically write
content to MW).

Number 4 above is a new approach to design, and extends to
collaboration platforms that are being used for open source hardware
collaborative development, too. Even most commercial services now do
this. (All of the above named work with some kind of standard save
Ning, see http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing/node/394 )

We believe an approach is needed that does not care what application
you are using, what programming language it is in, nor even what your
processes are (although knowing all of this helps), but only minimally
requires that you output in some way that is a standard that can be
mapped against. That output is where Paul and myself have created a
standard, which is a way to abstract above the common existing
barriers between web software applications. We have code that works
with Wagn now, that will allow for this abstraction, and we'll have
several demos for Nov.  We have even extended this to microcontrollers
like Arduino, and will likely provide a demo of this, too.

It would be good to know the exact processes of the meeting in Nov.
Will this be presentation based? Or, some other format? Either way, we
will be able to show some actual code demonstrations connecting wagn
with other open source apps, services, etc. Plus, we're ready to talk
about the underlying theory that drove us into this direction as
developers.

Thanks, Nathan, Phoebe, and Michel for putting this together. A really
needed meeting of minds in my opinion




-- 
-- 
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
skype: samuelrose
email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
http://socialsynergyweb.com
http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing
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http://socialmediaclassroom.com
http://localfoodsystems.org
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http://communitywiki.org

"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition." - Carl Sagan