From jerome.petazzoni at pilotsystems.net Wed Oct 29 13:10:28 2008 From: jerome.petazzoni at pilotsystems.net (=?ISO-8859-15?Q?J=E9r=F4me_Petazzoni?=) Date: Wed Oct 29 13:10:38 2008 Subject: [Sprints] Paris Bobun Sprint #2 at Google HQ : getting Open Social into Plone Message-ID: <490860C4.40008@pilotsystems.net> Dear all, Pilot Systems and Google are pleased to announce the second Paris Bobun Sprint, which will take place at the Google Paris HQ, from wednesday, november the 26th to sunday, november the 30th, 2008. The goal of this sprint is to enable Plone as an Open Social container, allowing any Plone site to host Open Social applications (also nicknamed "gadgets", or "boxes", since those applications tend to be enclosed in a well-delimited box of a social network website). Q: What is Open Social? A: It is a specification written by a group of social networks (Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, Viadeo, LinkedIn, among others), allowing developers to write applications (aka gadgets) which will work on any Open Social enabled network. See [1] and [2] for more detailed informations. Q: Wait, what is a "social application"? A: It is a web-based application, embedded into a social network. For instance, Facebook applications are social applications. However, we are targetting more business-oriented applications there. Q: Do you want to build a social network with Plone? A: Yes and no. Not one like Facebook, Orkut or LinkedIn, of course. But the concepts of social networks can easily be translated to Plone websites, especially collaborative tools like Intranets and CMS. Q: What are those concepts and how to you want to apply them to Plone applications? A: Open Social applications can basically get 3 kinds of information : who is the user (and what are his attributes, like name, age, etc), who are his friends or groups (links in the social network), and what he has been doing lately (as an "activity stream" conceptually similar to a RSS feed). Applications can also post events in this "activity stream". In a Plone-based CMS, you can (for instance) dynamically create groups based on the users who did edit (or change state) of a document ; and you can make up an activity stream based on who did view/edit/whatever documents in the web site. Q: How is that useful? A: Most Open Social applications are funny, but not very business-oriented. Our target are not the "poke your friend the werewolf to turn him into a zombie vampire" applications (although you could embed them alright). We would rather see applications able to compose useful information from the activity stream, or present them in a more useful way - for instance, showing recent edits of a document in a tag cloud. Q: I want to get involved, how can I help? A: We are looking for developers, but also for people to test, document, and of course actually use Open Social in Plone. We also would like to join forces with the Plone Social Networking group [3]. As usual in the communauty, everyone can help. Feel free ton contact pbs2@pilotsystems.net, or to get in touch with jpetazzo on #pbs2 on Freenode. (PBS2 stands for Paris Bobun Sprint, 2nd edition, in case you were wondering.) Q: I am familiar with Plone internals, and this stuff sounds cool ; and I want to come and join the sprint! A: Great! We will be very happy to have you in the team. Since Google can only host a finite amount of coders, please get in touch with jerome.petazzoni@pilotsystems.net (or jpetazzo on Freenode) to book a seat for the sprint itself. [1] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ [2] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/faq.html [3] http://groups.google.com/group/plone-social-networking -- J?r?me Petazzoni - jerome.petazzoni@pilotsystems.net Pilot Systems - 9, rue Desargues - 75011 Paris Tel : +33 1 44 53 05 55 - http://www.pilotsystems.net H?bergement Zope et Plone gratuit - http://www.objectis.org