[Social-discuss] Federating with special purpose, centralised networks

[Nick White]

Hi there,

I recently started working on the web team for a UK university, in a
position which gives me a good amount of freedom on the projects I work
on. Over the last couple of years the university developed a social
networking platform called Splash designed for students within the
university to interact. Basically it allows people to find course mates,
create profiles, send messages, and create blog posts, with nice widgets
on the homepage for timetables and similar. It's written in PHP & Zend,
and (thanks to the conditions of the funding secured for it) is released
under a permissive license.

More info can be found at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/splash/ (more info on
the project), http://code.google.com/p/splash-project/ (the code), and
http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/ (live deployment)

Anyway, I'm very interested in your work and ideas, and want to help.
The Splash project is centralised and what have you, but I'd love to
work on building more federation functionality into it, to allow people
to make use of it within or as part of a more decentralised, freedom &
privacy respecting network.

What are you thinking about as far as federation so far? Particularly
interoperating with more specific-use, centralised systems? What are
your thoughts about how distributed social networking will work? Is
there even a place a project such as Splash? Or do you see a more
useful approach being adding university-specific functionality as
modules for daisychain?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Nick White