Drupalcon London Federated Social Web BoF

Last Wednesday, Kendra organized a "Birds of a Feather" session about the status of OStatus for Drupal. The following points were discussed:

• Results from the previous Federated Social Web Summit 2011
• UMA (User-Managed Access) as an alternative authentication mechanism that works
• Political initiatives in the UK to incorporated federated authentication or activity
• FreedomBox distribution

• Drupal Commons

  • Possibly interested in collaboration
  • Using Facebook Statuses
  • Usefulness or need to aggregate the various Facebook, Twitter, etc. modules and providing some sort of Social API

• Need for a common Drupal Social API

  • Useful abstraction of features and social activity for various social networks for the purpose of interoperability

• Activity vs. Heartbeat

  • Heartbeat looking more promising ATM due to versatility, integration with Display Suite and Node.js among others
  • Doesn't need to be included in the OStatus stack (installation profile) but quite useful on a Social Hub profile

• Status.net (OStatus) as a useful reference: PHP + MySQL + FOSS = goodness

• Hub vs. spokes metaphor

  • Weak solution: users can publish activity from a common source hub (running Drupal), send out updates to their friends on various networks
  • Strong solution: users can publish activity from any hub on which they have an account and messages will be propagated as required

• Indie Project by Tantek Çelik

• The Locker Project by Jeremy Miller

• Actions: it would be helpful to make a discrete breakdown of tasks to be done, including the following:

  • Use cases
  • Testing of existing modules
  • Development
  • Usability (authentication, authorization, publishing, subscribing)
  • Documentation
  • Marketing & outreach

Kendra will start working on the installation profile and use cases during the coming week.
Anyone who is interested in taking on some of these other actions, please holla back!

cheers
Klokie