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The discussions of the workshop were fed by the input of the 72 position papers submitted by the participants, and animated by the Program Committee composed of experts from the industry and academics on this topic. See below for the 3 main topics of discussions identified by the Program Committee .
Thu, January 15
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 8:30-9:00 | Registration, logistics |
| 9:00-9:20 | Welcome and agenda review, by Christine Perey [slides] |
| 9:20-9:30 | W3C Overview, by Dominique Hazael-Massieux [slides] |
| 9:30-10:20 | Presentations on Appropriate Architectures for Social
Networking:
|
| 10:20-10:45 | Break |
| 10:45:12:15 | Breakout session on Distributed Social
Networking and Data mining and the
use of semantic web in social networks Questions under consideration: What is the possible role of W3C, and what should the W3C be sure to avoid? Distributed Social Networking , animated by Dan Appelquist (Vodafone)
|
| 12:15-13:15 | Lunch |
| 13:15-14:00 | Presentations on Privacy and
Trust and Distributed
Architectures and Business Models:
|
| 14:00-14:15 | Movements to breakout |
| 14:15-15:30 | Breakout on Privacy and Trust and Distributed
Architectures and Business Models Questions under consideration: What is the possible role of W3C, and what should the W3C be sure to avoid? Privacy and Trust, animated by Axel Ferazzini (OMA)
|
| 15:30-16:00 | Coffee break |
| 16:00-16:45 | Presentations on Deeper and Adaptive User Experiences |
| 16:45-17:30 | Plenary discussion, animated by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C):
Questions under consideration
|
Fri, January 16
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 8:30-8:45 | Agenda review, summary of previous day discussions |
| 8:45-10:00 | Reports from break out sessions from previous day
|
| 10:00-10:20 | Break |
| 10:20-11:30 | Presentations on Context and
Communities
Suggested reading: The Tangled Web We Weave, Greg Howard, Rajesh Kuppuswamy, Kaushik Sethuraman, Microsoft Corporation. |
| 11:30-12:30 | Panel discussions, animated by Sam Critchley (GyPSii)
Questions under consideration:
|
| 12:30-13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30-16:00 | Next steps
|
Topics of discussions
In reviewing the submissions to the workshop, the Program Committee identified 3 main topics of discussions.
Appropriate Architectures for Social Networking
Problem Statement: When, as is the case for most virtual communities today, a service is operated as a business, for profit, the operator of that community and its business partners make promises to the community members and in order to deliver on these, must carefully manage the resources in and around the community. The operators of communities have also invested considerably in the development of their platforms and prize the uniqueness of their services and the special relationships they have with the participants of the community. While the one-vendor model of social networking has many benefits and will likely persist in the future, many of the position papers submitted for this workshop's consideration are calling for massive decentralization of community (technology, user, business) silos (as currently designed, with centralized control).
The authors of W3C workshop position papers argue that centralization slows down/prevents the development of healthy partner ecosystems, limits the user(s) ease of access to one another (low connectivity between walled gardens) and has other negative effects.
- Distributed Social Networking
Digital experiences are increasingly becoming "social". To make it as easy for users to seamlessly control and share their social data, there need to be fewer impediments. There are several initiatives, both industrial and academic, aimed at developing a decentralized infrastructure for social networking.
A number of difficult issues including authentication, storage and ownership of information, trust, privacy and encryption, APIs, integrating diverse data formats, and the dissemination of information, need to be considered. There is also a wide desire for some sort of standardization in this area, with many groups outside the W3C already doing work, such as the Open Web Foundation, DataPortability.org, and the DiSO Project, and many already implement solutions like OpenID in this space. This session consists of several initiatives, both industrial and academic. Furthermore, we will discuss how one or more decentralized infrastructures for social networking might interoperate over the entire Web, including both desktop and mobile environments.
- Data mining
A number of different kinds of data, ranging from the output of APIs to various domain-specific formats, needs to be mapped to some common data format in order to enable social network analysis and data-mining. Microformats, XML-based formats, and common APIs must all be able to be mapped to each other to enable data integration. There are many different kinds of social data need to be mapped together, ranging from contact data in vCard to social network data in XFN. Outside of strictly social network data, there are many types of content, ranging from tags and domain-specific content, that should also be capable of being connected. One simple method that has gained increasing traction is standardizing on a simple common API, but a single API seems unable to handle the diverse and ever-expanding types of data available on social networks. While Semantic Web-based technologies could be the solution to this, it are too complicated and heavy-weight. This session will compare the various options and determine what the major problems are with each option, and then try to determine to what extent domain-specific data for social networking should also be standardized.
- Privacy and Trust
One aspect of the future of social networking is privacy and trust, and this becomes even more important in decentralized systems. While many people think that trust and privacy are simply relics of a bygone era in social networks, for many social networks some sort of trust and privacy requirement is important. First, in a decentralized environment, a user would need to be able to use a single login-in to access multiple services, and technologies like OpenID already exist to solve this problem. The reverse of identity aggregation must be also be considered: it can be equally important for many users to keep their identity separate over social networks. Second, what other users, developers, and operators, does the user trust for services and to whom is access to their information granted in a decentralized environment?
While work like OAuth clearly has made progress in this area, the ability for users to define groups and sub-groups, with different degrees of trust, is needed.
Lastly, there is the question of trust and privacy of the data itself. In a decentralized environment where data is integrated across boundaries, the ability to trust data itself, not just the identity of other people, is crucial.
- Distributed Architectures and Business Models
Social Networks have indeed a business potential but cannot be compared to traditional markets as is. Considering Social Networks' participants as mere potential costumers would be inappropriate; on the contrary they have to be regarded as active stakeholders of an ecosystem. The relationship between social networks and traditional enterprises could be complicated and it's likely that that an enterprises' excessive encroaching attitude towards them could be even harmful. It would certainly rise the subscribers' feeling of being manipulated hence reducing the attractiveness of a "private" ecosystem, which is the key success factor. Social Networks have to be distributed but still open, the traditional costumer exclusive "ownership" approach pertains to legacy paradigms. This session should identify the required actions for rising Social Networks potential and provide instruments to quantify their possible role in emerging business models.
There might be several monetization approaches. A Social Network has a value "per se" and could be sold to third party service providers; it could be served to an existing network of costumers as a free commodity; or be a new stand-alone economic ecosystem in which subscribers have an active role in the value chain; or even a mix of these scenarios.
Deeper and Adaptive User Experiences
The social network platform or agent can detect the type of device on which the user is connected at any point in time. When there is high speed, low cost network bandwidth available, this can be used for rich and immersive experiences. If the user is handicapped, the platform can adapt to provide compensatory interfaces. In the mobile handset, the use of widgets, the integration with the camera phone, the phone's addressbook are all ways to help users move seamlessly between their physical and digital words which do and will continue to co-exist. In this session we will discuss how intelligence in devices and networks can help users feel more connected with their communities and community sponsors.
Context and Communities
Contextual awareness adds value to consumer social networking services. Community operators can extract and leverage users' location information to provide more appropriate recommendations and to increase the satisfaction of social experiences between community participants. Unfortunately, every platform which uses context data today is developing technology and systems independently of other context management platforms and of the community messaging and advertising platforms to which these contextual data producers are complementary.
In the past, mobile network operators controlled all contextual data on subscribers. But, recently, with GPS in devices, services have begun to capture and leverage the location information gathered and/or managed by another service. For example,one application might determine a user's location and store it on a server for other applications to access and use.
In this session we will tackle multiple problems frequently associated with context sharing within and between communities and context service platforms.
Venue
See the venue page.