As President of the OpenSocial, I'm pleased to announce the formation of two new Foundation sponsored workgroups (officially called Board Advisory Committees), that will focus on two areas of great importance; alignment with key open source and standards efforts, and interoperability.
OpenSocial has grown organically over the last few years, expanding from traditional social networks like MySpace into community oriented sites such as the Nature Network (see the earlier blog post). OpenSocial has even moved into the enterprise with offerings from Cisco, Liferay, and others all supporting the standard. Now, we are seeing the formation of application market places, e.g. Jive Apps Market, based on OpenSocial Technology.
As our community grows into this diverse ecosystem of containers and application providers, it becomes essential that our you have multiple ways to get involved and be recognized for your hard work. To help foster this community interaction the Foundation's Board has established two new Advisory Committees, a.k.a, workgroups.
The Open Standards and Open Source Alignment Advisory Committee
The availability of a production quality reference framework and implementation is a fundamental enabler of open standards. As many of the open source projects continue to grow, and as OpenSocial continues to add new capability, it becomes important to ensure that we have the ability to quickly implement these innovative new features, without sacrificing the ability to incrementally build upon and maintain core capability. Here are some of the things this workgroup will tackle:
The Open Standards and Open Source Alignment Advisory Committee
The availability of a production quality reference framework and implementation is a fundamental enabler of open standards. As many of the open source projects continue to grow, and as OpenSocial continues to add new capability, it becomes important to ensure that we have the ability to quickly implement these innovative new features, without sacrificing the ability to incrementally build upon and maintain core capability. Here are some of the things this workgroup will tackle:
- Keep the community, and the Board, abreast of key open source projects, notably, Apache Shindig
- Work across open source projects to coordinate release cycles of the specification with implementations
- Ensure an accurate, up-to-date set of examples and documentation that are consistent with the specification
- Recommend alignment with key industry standards and specification efforts, e.g. Activity Streams, One Social Web, and others as appropriate
- Participate in the definition of the OpenSocial vision
- Recommend to Board on where resource investments should be made to the benefit of the entire community, so that Board members and Officers can work within their organizations and the community to secure the allocation of resources
The Interop & Enterprise Advisory Committee
One of the stated missions of OpenSocial is to provide a common programming model that allows a social application developer to write their application once, and have it run in a wide variety of containers. We've taken a very positive first step, but as a community, we've got to do better if we are to make this vision real. In addition, vendors have added their own capabilities that deviate from the specification. We will need to work with those vendors get them to invest their valuable resources into OpenSocial and bring their enhancements back to the community via the standard and open source. The purpose of this workgroup is to have a focused set of people responsible for spearheading this effort. Here's some of what will be on the plate of people who work on this important team:
- Ensure updated and accurate compliance test suites
- Plan, supervise, and manage interop events on a regular basis
- Actively recruit key industry participants (containers and app vendors) to participate in the events
- Recommend and propose changes to the specification to improve interoperability
- Define interop scenarios based upon real world aggregation experience across multiple domains, e.g. enterprise, education, retail, games, etc...
- Recommend and propose changes to the development process to ensure the ability to keep pace with innovation in the industry, early prototyping, transparent development, and, of course, interop
- Establish strategy for alignment with key industry interoperability efforts, e.g. SWAT0
We've already gotten off to a good start! Paul Lindner has volunteered to lead the work group on Open Source and Open Standards alignment.With his leadership of Shindig, this is a great fit. But Paul can't do it alone. WE NEED YOU to be successful!
These are great opportunities to get involved and help advance the OpenSocial technology and grow our community! If you are interested, please contact me or one of the Foundation Officers or Board Members directly, or post to the OpenSocial community discussion group.
Thanks!
Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation
