Presence and IntComm WG

[Jesse Thompson <>]

Thanks for the details Mark.  I think that this idea is promising.  It 
would be nice to try it out.  Does Duke have a test installation of 
BuddyCloud that we can try federating with?

Jesse

On 2/22/12 10:27 AM, Mark P. McCahill wrote:
> 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.

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