Eureka! Lockheed Martin contributes OpenSocial platform to open source

Lockheed Martin Corporation recently announced the release of its first open source software initiative around social media called Eureka Streams. Eureka Streams is a social media platform that integrates activity streams and OpenSocial apps. Lockheed Martin has spent the past several years growing a strategy of Social Software within the Enterprise to bring widely distributed employees together. Eureka Streams takes that vision further by incorporating what works well on the internet and builds a platform based on open standards to expand social media even further.

Eureka Streams, initially built internally, is now being made available
under the Apache License as open source. Shindig version 1.1 (beta)
integration provides the framework to offer the OpenSocial 0.9
features, creating a user focused OpenSocial gadget container that can
access the user profiles and activity data created within the tool.
The UI has been developed using Google Web Toolkit to provide a
flexible JavaScript front end developed in Java.

Eureka Streams is currently released to open source at version
0.9. The team has placed a heavy focus on user interaction,
performance, and scalability to this point, but is shifting their
focus to the developer and looking for support from the open source
community.

For more information and to learn how to get started, please visit the Eureka Streams web site.

Posted on behalf of Steve Terlecki, Lockheed Martin Corp, by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Nature chooses OpenSocial

We’d like to share a little bit about why we adopted the OpenSocial platform for our new online service, called Workbench (http://network.nature.com/workbench), but first we should probably fill in some details about who we are.

Founded in 1869 as a vehicle for reporting the grand results of scientific work and discovery, Nature (www.nature.com) is one of the most distinguished scientific publishers in the world. Nature exists to be a scientific communications company, and back in 1869 the best way to achieve that goal was to publish a periodical. Nowadays, if you were to start with that mission you would most likely start on the Internet.

Nature Network (http://network.nature.com/) is our domain-specific network for researchers. Our intention with Nature Network is to not only provide a platform where scientists can create an online presence and interact with each other, but also to bring interesting information and functionality to scientists. There are a few advantages to having a domain-specific network over a generic network. First of all, it allows the emergence of community norms, i.e. tone of voice, that are fit for that specific community. Also, by creating and hosting our own network, we have the chance to connect the research literature with the social activity around that literature. We have started, for example, to link our academic papers to blog posts that mention those papers, and we have many plans going forward to extend these kinds of connections.

While working on upgrading our site over the last year, we decided to build in an API and so became interested in OpenSocial. Obviously, since Nature Network promotes social connections, OpenSocial was a contender straight away. We wanted to be able to host interesting functionality on our site and the gadget specification is perfect for that.

Our redevelopment process happened in Java, and again that was a great fit with the Shindig project. Being able to see an active developer community around the standard and around the reference implementation was also a major factor in our decision. Our developers found it easy to integrate Shindig with the code that we were creating and they did this quickly as an early prototype. Seeing our wireframes turn into a live demo was a great moment - it was at the point that we took the decision to go with OpenSocial.

We are planning to open our gadget platform and API to external developers so that all the exciting activity that is happening within Nature Network finds its way to anyone who is interested.

To summarise, we wanted to be able to create an API and offer gadgets to our users. OpenSocial provided a great answer to both of those needs. As we continue to evolve and add capability to the Workbench, we are planning to open our gadget platform and API to external developers so that we can build an ecosystem based on open standards around all the exciting activity that is happening within Nature Network. The ongoing development and great documentation that exists have given us confidence in the project and we are excited by the direction that OpenSocial is heading.

Please feel free to drop us a note with your questions. Contact us via e-mail, network at nature.com.
Nature Network Team

Nature Network is the professional networking website for scientists around the world. It’s an online meeting place where you and your colleagues can gather, share and discuss ideas, and keep in touch. It’s also where you can consult the community for answers to scientific questions or offer your expertise to help others. Additionally, using the Workbench, you can collate your online scientific tools together in a customizable workspace, allowing you to group your most important tools and information in the way that works best for you.

Posted on behalf of the Nature Network Team by Mark Weitzel, Secretary, OpenSocial Foundation

The votes are in!

The OpenSocial Foundation community representatives election has concluded. You have selected Paul Lindner and Mark Halvorson to serve as your two representatives for this year's board. Congratulations to Paul and Mark!

For those of you looking to get involved with OpenSocial, there are many opportunities outside the board, including:

• wiki.opensocial.org: Contribute to documenting best practices and articles on the new OpenSocial community wiki
• Get Started Building Apps: Brainstorm, check out a few tutorials, and get programming
• Help build OpenSocial 1.1: Participate in the on-going evolution of OpenSocial's technical specification by contributing to the next version of the specification

See you on the forums!

Posted on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation by Mark Weitzel (Secretary)

The polls are closed!!

Greetings Everyone,

This is just a quick note to let you know that the election for the two OpenSocial Board Community Representatives is now officially closed. We will be tallying up the ballots and posting the results shortly.

I would like to thank all of our nominees for being willing to commit their time and effort to OpenSocial, as well as all of those who took the time to vote. Finally, I owe one last thank you to Ryan Boyd of Google who went above and beyond to helped make everything happen behind the scenes.

Posted on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation by Mark Weitzel (Secretary)

Rock the Vote: Community Representatives election is open!

The election for the OpenSocial Foundation's community board representatives is now open. If you previously applied for membership, you should have received an email directing you to submit your ballot. The election will close at 11:59 PM PDT on Tuesday, June 15, 2010. You can find information on each person on the candidate info page.

Two of these candidates will be elected by the community to serve on the OpenSocial Foundation's Board of Directors. As a reminder, the role of the OpenSocial Foundation is to promote the OpenSocial specification, and to help ensure that it remains freely implementable by all, in perpetuity. You can find more information about the foundation by visiting the OpenSocial Foundation FAQ.

If you have not submitted a membership application to the OpenSocial Foundation, and would like to have your voice heard in this election you still may do so. To be eligible to vote in the current election, you must submit the OpenSocial Foundation membership application (it's free) by 11:59 PM PDT on Tuesday, June 8, 2010.

If you have any questions or comments about the election please visit the OpenSocial community forum.

Posted by Mark Weitzel, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

Board Nominations Close Tuesday, June 1!

Greetings!

Just a quick reminder for everyone.

Nominations for the OpenSocial Board of Directors community seats are underway and will close on Tuesday, June 1, 2010. Please use the on-line form to nominate someone.

We are looking forward to working with the community and to another great year for OpenSocial.

Posted on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation by Mark Weitzel

OpenSocial State of the Union 2010 Recap

On behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation, I would like to thank everyone that attended the State of the Union event. A special thank you to the wonderful team at MySpace for arranging and hosting this event. With the participation of about a hundred at he event, I am confident we can move the standard forward.

If you missed it, you can check out the slides for the event. Here a quick summary of some of the key topics we discussed:

• We have new Board members and great energy (Welcome Cody Simms from Yahoo! and Jason Gary from IBM). Also, please take advantage of the 2 community seats available. Nominations are open and any member of the OpenSocial Foundation is welcome to participate.
• It is exciting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” Social networks and into domain specific networks and even major enterprise vendors.
• We seek your help in giving our foundation’s pages/navigation an uplift. Feel free to jump in and add your ideas.
• OpenSocial 1.0 next--Here's what's on tap: improvements to the existing OAuth implementation, inter-gadget communication, and views for Mobile devices. We also need to pay attention to the development & spec process. Our goal is to get prototypes and spec patches in now, followed by a tight, well controlled, editing cycle.
• The board is excited about engaging OpenSocial’s worldwide community. We are looking to sponsor events outside the U.S. and will be working on figuring this out over the next few weeks.

Here are some more details below about the event. Please feel add your thoughts & suggestions as comments to this blog post.

The event started off with introductions of the Foundation Board members and officers. Cody Simms is Yahoo!’s corporate designate. IBM is a new corporate member and has designated Jason Gary as their representatives. Welcome Cody and Jason. The complete list of your Foundation Officers and Board Members is in the FAQs.

In addition to new corporate members of the OpenSocial Foundation Board, there are two community seats available. Anyone is able to serve on the board. The only requirement to nominate or hold the position is that you must be a member of the OpenSocial Foundation. There are no membership fees to join OpenSocial. All you need to do is fill out a simple on-line membership application.

It’s been an exciting year and a half for OpenSocial! We’ve seen continued adoption of the specification as new containers come on line. Perhaps what is more interesting is that we are starting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” social networks. This includes adoption by enterprise vendors such as Jive, Atlassian, and IBM.

Before getting into the heart of the discussion, we reviewed our current Web presence. Right now, we’ve got information buried on existing pages, scattered across different sites, and in general, have an inconsistent way of engaging our members. As a result, we are going to start looking at how to clean this up. Please post a note to the community group list if you’d like to help with this effort. There’s also a wiki page to capture your ideas.

Looking ahead for the remainder of this year and into next, we’ve got some exciting things starting to happen. First of all, we agreed on the scope and timeline for “OpenSocial 1.0 next”. There were three areas that we’d like to start working on for the next version of the spec; improvements to the existing OAuth implementation, inter-gadget communication, and views for Mobile devices. There’s already some code for intergadget communication in Shindig, and the team from Mixi has put together a good starting point for Mobile.

We will be following the development process and incorporating the extensions mechanism that we outlined last year. This means that we should be able to accept patches to the spec and prototypes now! Our goal is to get prototypes and spec patches in now, followed by a tight, well controlled, editing cycle. Ideally, this gives us time to try out the prototypes now, rather than actually developing and prototyping the new features at the same time we are writing the spec. The specification process and extension process will be updated in the next few days to reflect these ideas.

It is also worth noting is that we’d like to get as many of these prototypes as possible into Shindig so it’s easy for people to try them out. Paul Linder and the Shindig community has done a great job over the last few months of refactoring and organizing the code to make this much easier. Thanks to Paul and the Shindig committers!

One of the original goals of OpenSocial was to create a community that could rapidly prototype new ideas. With the development process, the extensions mechanism, and Shindig, we’ve got all the pieces in place to do just that. An example of this is the work that has been done to provide a prototype of the ActivityStrea.ms specification.

But we don’t want to stop there! A number of new and exciting ideas in the social Web space are emerging, and as a community, we should be prototyping them as quickly as possible to understand their impact to OpenSocial. Examples of these include Salmon, Pubsubhubbub, Web Finger, and OAuth 2.0. Let’s get prototypes going now so that when these specs become final, it’s easy for us to provide an open source implementation and a clean path into OpenSocial spec. This way, we can move the entire industry forward—together—faster.

So far, most (if not all), of the ‘official’ OpenSocial Foundation sponsored events have been located in the United States. One of our goals for this year is to change that. A number of members have expressed interest in having events in Asia and Europe. This is a great way for our community to engage the large number of world wide container providers and businesses that are successfully implementing OpenSocial. The Board is very excited about reaching out to our worldwide membership and is looking forward to helping the community make this happen.

Thank you, once again, to the team at MySpace. There were great to work with and put on a fantastic event. I would also like to thank our community. It’s because of you that we had a great event.

Now let’s get prototyping!

Posted by Mark Weitzel, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation