COmanage Developers List

[Niels van Dijk <>]

Hi all,

just so you guys are up to speed on this as well: Sakai and Blackboard
are currently talking (be it under NDA) about extending Shindig with
'eduSocial'
(Frank Benneker is from the University of Amsterdam, and currently
working for us in COIN on behalf of our instututions)

cheers,
Niels

---------

From: csev 
[mailto:]
Sent: donderdag 8 juli 2010 15:16
To: Benneker, Frank
Subject: Re: sharing some ideas on extending Shindig with eduSocial



Frank,



This is great - lots of folks are thinking about the same thing and we
will be so much more successful if we come up with a unified approach
and make it so gadgets work on all systems.



For me, I want to ultimately do this as a standard from IMS.  But I
don't like starting a working group too early because then process
trumps engineering and slows everything down.



I am talking to lots of folks about this - Blackboard is also involved -
but that is non-disclosure so if we get organized we could launch
together with a common gadget extension across a wide range of
implementations.  If we do this all separately, it will likely fail and
make "OpenSocial + Learning" a negative rather than the positive.



I would like to create a group of folks to talk about this stuff going
forward so we stay aligned.  Of course any coordination always slows
things down but I believe that if we let those doing the work making the
decisions, then we solve some of the tendency to "debate rather than
work".



I would like to have a workshop about this - perhaps at the OU / UK this
fall so we can all talk a bit.



/Chuck



On Jul 8, 2010, at 8:36 AM, Benneker, Frank wrote:





Hi Chuck,

I enjoyed reading your latest blogposts on Shindig and extending Shindig
with options for supporting learning features.

At the moment I'm working one day a week for SURFnet (the Dutch
National Research and Educational Network, http://www.surfnet.nl/en/) as
a project member on the COIN project. The Coin project aims to develop a
Collaboration Infrastructure for HE.



(website quote http://www.surfnet.nl/en/thema/coin/Pages/Default.aspx)

SURFnet is now taking the following step by proceeding with its
innovative Collaboration Infrastructure project (COIN). In COIN, SURFnet
and the higher education and research sector are developing an
infrastructure based on open standards that will allow applications and
systems to share information online. The infrastructure will link
collaboration services set up by educational institutions, research
organisations, commercial parties and SURFnet and enable them to
interact, thus making custom, flexible online collaboration possible


The core components of the COIN architecture will be built on Shindig
and will use the Open Social API's and specs.

We plan on working on what we called 'eduSocial', an extention to
OpenSocial for the edu domain, and plan to investigate together with
parties within Dutch higher education what should go into that, but have
not gotten round to that yet. Next to that we feel that is would  be
rather useless if SURFnet on its own would be defining this eduSocial
extention, as it is only useful when it gets implemented.

We also did some investigation into what it would take to introduce
eduSocial in Shindig, and also looked at hooking up Identity Federations
like SURFfederatie and InCommon to OpenSocial. We found this to work
rather well, however also found that some attributes usefull for the edu
space are currently not available in OpenSocial. These included
affiliation, classes, good support for groups. (based on Internet2
grouper, which is the engine under SURFteams federated groupmanager)

Personally I think this could also be of interest for future release of
the Sakai 3 kernels. There has a some contact e few months ago with Ian
Boston to inform him on our ideas in his role as Shindig committer.

As I said we would be very interested in working with you to get to a
some sort of an 'eduSocial' profile into the OpenSocial community. And I
think we could very easily find an institution to work with us on this
as well. Actually we have some resources for that already in our
planning for the next months to work on such a thing.



Kind Regards,

Frank



----------------------------------------------------------------------

Frank Benneker

University of Amsterdam

T/M : + 31 20 525 4914

@: 


hours: Mon-Tue-Wed-Thurs






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