[Freedombox-discuss] Social Sync (was: Re: Is / Is Not)

[Josef Spillner]

Hello,

:: Jonas Smedegaard Donnerstag 09 Juni 2011
> I believe such scenarios are best solved using semweb technologies -
> i.e. FOAF, WebID and RDF.
[...]
> No shiny user-ready applications on that front yet, however.

Indeed, however several people are already aware of this issue and work on 
such "social (network) synchronisation" tools.
Here's a related minddump^Wconcept which I recently came up with after 
gathering the input from two workshops in this area. Its aim is to have 
integration of contacts, events, pictures etc. from the network all the way up 
into the user's desktop (and back again if desired). Therefore it includes 
commonly-used PIM-related file formats in addition to some fancy semantic 
formats:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/ocs/attachments/20110608/856bf49a/attachment-0001.png

This is a nice isolated topic which is of benefit to the freedombox but not 
necessarily in all of its aspects exclusive to it. Therefore, if more people 
are interested in "social sync", I recommend taking the development parts of 
it off the main mailing list to some other place. At least the building blocks 
for free desktops and free mobile platforms are already developed and 
packaged, so having a working solution in the given timeframe appears to be 
realistic.

The topic is also somewhat overlapping, but still complementary to the trend 
of running services as decentralised inter-communication nodes in terms of 
data souvereignty. How much the overlap and the mutual benefit is still needs 
to be found out, of course.

Josef