Status.net has organized a Federated Social Web Summit to occur on July 18th, 2010 in Portland Oregon. Before you get too excited, this is a private and invite-only event for active groups developing code specific to federation of the web. The goal of the summit is for the teams working on initiatives to discuss their current work and plan for future co-operation between each other.
Status.net CEO Evan Prodomou describes federation as “just means letting people on different social networks follow each other”. He goes on to say “There are dozens of businesses and Open Source projects working on the problem of social network federation. We want to make sure that people are working together so a robust, heterogeneous network-of-networks can emerge.”
In May I wrote about how we need an open and federated social network and I’m glad to see this event being organized. I hope these groups can work together to create a foundation for this effort to progress smoothly and quickly as we will all benefit by this in the long run.
From the Status.net post:
Invitees to the event include StatusNet, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others. “Were focusing only on committers: people and organizations whove put code on the table to make federation work,” says Jon Phillips, StatusNet Community Director. “In the future, well need to coordinate marketing and promotion of the federated social web, but this event is about making code work.”
