Oren’s Weblog

Sheila is giving us the update on Chandler.

With the 0.6 release folks in OSAF are “dogfooding” the app themselves.
Mitch Kapor and his assistant Esther are using it and push the capabilities.

0.7 will enhance the calendar and bring more people in to use it. It will also bring in some of Mimi Yin’s design vision for a collaborative PIM.

The Scooby web client has to catch up with Chandler. They’re looking at 2 month release cycles for Scooby.

They launched a hosting service in December using the Cosmo server. Foxmarks is using Cosmo as a repository. Foxmarks is on the Mozilla download page, so it’s gotten quite popular and the usage has forced them to get Cosmo performing to meet the use. The next version of Cosmo will implement CalDAV free/busy reports, to support CalDAV scheduling in Chandler.

Looking for Chandler beta 1.0 in about a year. Sheila is working on a concrete plan for the 1.0 roadmap.

Sheila asks whether people have satisfied the needs they had that led them to originally invest in Chandler. Jack Duwe remarks that three years ago when this started, Oracle had just purchased Steltor, and at this point Oracle hasn’t pulled the rug out from under them, which was a concern at the time.

Greg notes that what’s emerging is a client that looks to be nice and integrated (like Outlook), and that most of us have become rather settled in our environments. One possibility is that we say this has been an interesting collaboration and learning experience, and we go on our separate ways. Or we could find new ways, now that our three years of funding is running out, to continue the collaboration.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, CSG-Spring-2006, chandler

Paul Hill from MIT starts off by stating that, since universities are in the business of nurturing lifetime and multi-generational relationships, then we need to be in the social software space.

He then asks why we would encourage (or allow) faculty to do course interactions in commercial services, and what the relationship to FERPA and other regulations are. This will drive us to create many parallel services of our own.

we encourage students to collaborate and work in teams. There are pedagogical styles that support engagement and reinforce learning objectives. We want to increase interaction between students and faculty. IM helps facilitate that at MIT. Zephyr, MIT’s messaging system, has seen a decrease in use, and there’s anecdotal evidence that faculty are asking students for their IM handles on commercial systems.

Policy issues – are you going to provide logging of IM? Will these systems have implications for ID management? How will you respond to requests for logs, etc.?

Will you create a closed community or an open community?

What are the long term implications for your namespace?
Convergence – shared whiteboard and IM

Paul shows scripts.mit.edu – allows anyone on campus to run pretty much any script through a web server.

Standards in this space – SIP

Jabber/XMPP is gaining critical mass. There’s now 26 people in the back channel chat room – last CSG the max was 8.

SVG will be of interest – not coming as fast as hoped, but there are plugins for most browsers.

Blog standards? There are lots of posting APIs, but no formal standards.

Also in wikis there are de-facto standards, but not formal ones. RL Bob notes that divergence of markup makes it hard to make content portable.

Ken asks what the implications of Infocards will be in this space for access control. Paul says that the focus of Infocard is the phishing problem, not total identity control. RL Bob – “Just a new way to log in.”

Bob notes that there are a number of people working on Shibboleth-enabling Confluence – Internet2 among them. At MIT IS&T is introducing support for campus for both Media Wiki and Confluence.

Paul shows an ink enabled wiki. Unfortunately, the ink standard is a Microsoft “open standard”. But at least the information is published.

Yale supports Jive for chat, integrated with their auth systems.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social software, social-software

In 2005 student surveys they didn’t ask any direct questions about social networking, but they learned a lot from qualitative interviews.

In the 2006 survey they asked direct questions

One of the most popular groups in facebook is I Just Tried to Ford the River and My Fucking Oxen Died – a tribute the the Oregon Trail computer game, which was many people’s first game. Students are commonly in 30-40 groups.

Students aren’t blogging, by and large.

Students don’t think of IM as technology – it surprises them when we talk about it that way. They consider IM their personal space, not a place for the institution.

There’s a good study on the k-12 expereience at netday.org. 78% of high school seniors use IM every day.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social-software

I’ve been acting as the ringleader for this morning’s workshop on social software. I started off with a brief setting of context [pdf] about social software, and then presented some results from our membership survey on the topic.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social-software

I’ve been acting as the ringleader for this morning’s workshop on social software. I started off with a brief setting of context [pdf] about social software, and then presented some results from our membership survey on the topic.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social-software

Jim Phelps from Wisconsin is talking about the emergence of Web 2.0 and what the distinguishing features are. It’s a good primer on what’s going on in the Web 2.0 space for folks who might not be completely up to speed on it.

Putting stuff up to share, starting with friends and family, leading to the discovery of others who share the same interests, which leads to the formation of communities.

Folksonomies – a sense of content and context – the tags people have used to describe a resource. Jim shows Flickr and Technorati, YouTube, etc. Jim also shows Jon Udell’s infoworld explorer, and Udell’s delicious affinity app.

Jim notes that by using Udell’s affinity app to see which users have similar interests and what else they have bookmarked, one can easily accomplish the same kind of literature analysis that traditionally takes academics weeks in the library.

Jim shows Connotea, a social site oriented towards academic researchers, that I hadn’t seen before. He also shows CiteULike citation manager and tagger.

There’s lots of discussions about what the roles universities should play in this space, how responsible are we for what students and staff do in non-university hosted spaces, how hands-off can we be?

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social software

Yesterday was a lovely spring day in Madison, with mild temperatures in the 70s (farenheit). Today it’s gray, raining, windy, and temperatures are down in the low 50s and dropping quickly. They’re saying we may have some snow before the day is out. Wow!