(BOF = Birds of a Feather, i.e., an open discussion with the chairs in a circle. This one is packed.)

Peter Kaminski has suggested a place where standards and ideas for social software can be proposed, kicked around, and maybe even implemented in rough and ready ways. The idea is to have a central coordination point to see if other people are thinking about the same thing. Goal: interoperability. He’s set up a wiki for it.

The meeting has gotten off to a bad start by too many people trying to decide how the email list ought to be forked; besides being a relatively trivial topic, the group has no way of resolving such issues. After about 10 minutes, Dave Sifry says that this is beside the point. The question is, he says,: Are we going to do something or not?

Pete asks how the group should be organized. General answer: Not. Let it emerge.

Discussion of the need for a broader understanding of the social effect of software. [Is social software necessarily democratic?]. Pete says that he can see a developer’s pledge coming out of this.

Greg makes an impassioned plea for seizing this remarkable moment in our history. And we should make the medium and small advances we can without waiting to figure out all the big issues.

Initial standards to discuss:

Kevin Marks suggests vote links: adding +1 or -1 to a hyperlink to indicate whether you agree with the object of the link.

Pete brings up Matt and Paolo’s topic standard, ENT.

Marc Canter brings up threadsML, near and dear to my heart. And an identity system.

Greg wants to manage images as collections of objects.

Saman Far: RFID

Dave Sifry: digital ID and stuff that connects the Web with “meatspace” (e.g., meetup.org). (Dave says he thinks we ought to start with email addresses as our digital identities.)

(I couldn’t hear some of the responses.)

A tentative meeting if only because most of the attendees are reluctant to impose order on an emerging social network, but worthwhile. Social software is going to be an important category.

Jason has a good comment on social software…

Categories: Uncategorized dw