Presence and IntComm WG

["Mark P. McCahill" <>]

On Feb 22, 2012, at 10:19 AM, Jesse Thompson wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I regret that I didn't participate in the last wg-pic conference call. It 
> sounds like it was an interesting topic.  See the message below from Jeanne 
> regarding Wisconsin's interest in Sakai.  Keep me posted about any 
> initiatives regarding Sakai, BuddyCloud, and XMPP.
> 

Hi Jesse!

The Sakai connection came from something we are working on here at Duke. As 
part of the Toolkits work we have been doing, we are creating activity 
streams (or channels) that span the applications a community uses to 
collaborate. 

For instance, a community (or a course) might use Sakai for tests/quizes, 
Wordpress for blogging, and a Sympa mailing list. A Toolkits activity 
stream/channel can combine both users writing messages to the channel and 
automated posts notifying the community of actions occurring in the various 
applications. 

Example: I might post a message to the activity stream (or channel) to tell 
everyone about a cute cat picture I found, and at the same time a script 
might post a message that there is a new comment from Liz on the community 
blog. If you have a distributed community using distributed applications, 
this sort of live-updated commons is a way for everyone to see what is 
happening.

The idea is to create something like a Facebook-style wall for the community, 
so that even if you are using multiple applications, both people and 
applications can post notices about what might be important to the community.

BuddyCloud is an interesting platform for this because it has the idea of 
federated channels, and the possibility of being a platform where I could 
subscribe to both channels for my coursework, and social channels - all with 
realtime updates. So I think of BuddyCloud is a communications and 
collaboration infrastructure that can be used for all sorts of things, 
including (but not limited to) academic learning. 


> I'm trying to define the line between where I should be involved vs. when I 
> should punt to Jeanne and Scott.  I focus on communication and 
> collaboration infrastructure technology (email, calendaring, chat, etc), 
> and Jeanne focuses more on academic learning technology (Desire2Learn, 
> Moodle, etc).
> 
> From my initial glance at these products, it appears that Sakai is 
> something that I wouldn't be involved with, unless there is a way for Sakai 
> to be installed on top of our existing XMPP infrastructure. BuddyCloud 
> looks like it could be an additional service offering in my area, but I 
> can't tell how much it overlaps with our existing XMPP infrastructure.  Am 
> I on the right track?
> 

In the conversation yesterday, Sakai was just one of many apps that might 
send (and display) notifications. 

The problem with most of the monolithic collaboration and learning management 
systems is they try to solve the problem of "what is happening in the 
community?" by limiting you to using the application rather than acting as a 
scaffolding to link best of breed apps. BuddyCloud could be an interesting 
scaffolding to link distributed applications (and users). At least that is 
why we are taking a hard look at it here at Duke.

I did talks about these ideas at the Internet2 fall member meeting and 
Educause last fall. Here are some links to the presentations - the first one 
is a quicktime movie that includes demos of the activity stream work (which 
is not yet using BuddyCloud) but that should give you a better idea of what 
we are up to.

http://www.duke.edu/~mccahill/Internet2-Toolkits-the-movie.mov
http://www.educause.edu/sites/default/files/library/presentations/E11/SESS074/2011_Duke-Educause_academic_architecture-overview.pdf


> Do you have any details on how Sakai and/or BuddyCloud would use existing 
> XMPP infrastructure?  Or is XMPP merely the technology that Sakai and 
> BuddyCloud use as their transports?  Another way to ask: are these services 
> something that would replace our existing XMPP service (p2p chat, muc), 
> enhance the feature set, or something that an organization would run 
> alongside and independent of a traditional XMPP service?
> 

I think of BuddyCloud as an enhancement to the traditional XMPP services. It 
would not replace chat, muc, etc - but it would run over the existing XMPP 
infrastructure to provide social-style activity streams and channels that can 
give you some of what Facebook or Google+ provide without the data mining and 
privacy issues that come with Facebook or Google.