OpenSocial State Of The Union - 2012

This year's "State of the Union" event will be held on Tuesday, July 17, 2012 at the Jive offices in Portland, Oregon. It lines up with OSCON, the premier conference for open source technologies. We'll have discounted passes for the conference, so be sure to check out the OSCON site for all the detailed information about that event. If you just want to grab some swag, we'll also have "Expo Only" tickets as well.

While past State of the Union events have been structured as a "mini conference", this year we've decided to take a different tact. The Foundation's primary goals are to enable our community in developing open standards and technology that advance the social Web and foster a vibrant, open ecosystem of social platforms and applications. This year's event will be a series of working sessions where we will focus on specific topics that, as a community, we need to address in the upcoming year. Each session will be moderated to keep us on track. The moderator will produce an "action plan" that we'll use to track our progress and measure our results. 

Changing an industry is never easy and, as always, there's plenty of work to do! Please come, roll up your sleeves, and join us for a great day of advancing the social Web. 

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

                                                    ~ Alan Kay

Eventbrites

State of the Union - http://sotu2012.eventbrite.com/_

Shindig / Rave Meetup - http://shindigraveoscon.eventbrite.com/

The Working Sessions ~ Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Time

Description

Moderator

8:30 ~ 8:45

~ Welcome & Introductions ~

Andrew Smith, Treasurer,  OpenSocial Foundation

8:45 ~ 11:30

~ Foundation Strategy & Direction ~
Over the last four years or so, OpenSocial has grown organically in many different directions. While the landscape of consumer social networking has changed over the last several years, OpenSocial has continued to remain a vibrant community. We've seen explosive adoption among "domain specific" social networks in education and scientific research, as well as enterprise vendors such as SugarCRM, Jive Software, IBM and many others. Throughout this time, OpenSocial has continued to provide innovative solutions to the industry through the open specification and open source projects such as Apache Shindig and Rave. 

Despite this broad adoption, it's possible that OpenSocial may be the industry's "best kept secret". In addition, while Google was instrumental in getting us started, we're still sometimes seen as one of their initiatives, rather than the open community we've grown into. This working session will address these issues. We'll look for innovative ways to communicate the business value of adopting OpenSocial and re-energize our "brand". We'll define strategies on how to attract new social business applications to our ecosystem by providing new channels to broad audiences. 

Dion Hincliffe,
EVP Strategy, Dachis Group & Board Member, OpenSocial Foundation

11:30 ~ 12:30

~ Working Lunch: How to on-board developers ~ 
Although there are a lot of people building OpenSocial applications, it's sometimes hard to find them! This session will focus on getting our members more actively engaged. We'll look to revitalize the heart beat of our blog, tell the success stories of people who have adopted OpenSocial, and establish (or partner with) local user groups.

Andrew Davis, Community Member

12:30 ~
2:00

~ Community Challenge: OSOOTBP, OpenSocial's "Out of the Box" Experience ~ 
Just gonna be honest for a moment. OpenSocial's out of the box experience is like the little 5 year old kid on Christmas Day who opens the toy super duper toy he's wanted for six months only to discover... "Some Assembly Required". 
Simply put, we've got to do better. This is the second community challenge we'll be issuing during this year's State of the Union. Get up and running with an OpenSocial platform in 15 minutes. This should target a specific use case and be built using only technologies available in open source, e.g. Apache Rave, SugarCRM, and Alfresco. 

Clint Oram, Board Member, SugarCRM

2:00 ~ 3:30

~ Community Challenge: How can I write an OpenSocial App in 5 minutes?  ~ 
Although we've got some great technology, it's sometimes very hard to get started. We've grown so fast that people who want to adopt our technology sometimes get lost. We need to provide a set of tooling, best practices, and working examples that break down this barrier. To this end, we're issuing a challenge to our community: What will it take to write a full featured app in 5 minutes?

Matt Franklin, Community Member

3:30 ~ 4:15

~ Tutorial Forge ~
OpenSocial is elegant in it's simplicity but avails the developer a tremendous amount of power and flexibility. However, the full capability of the programming model is often lost in a myriad of documents spread across the various OpenSocial Web properties. Admittedly, some of these are out of date and do not reflect the latest programming model. This working session will construct a full outline of tutorials that should be presented to the developer. These will cover everything from the "getting started" to data pipelining and proxied content.

Ryan Baxter, Community Member

4:15 ~ 5:00

~ What's Hot in OpenSocial 2.5 ~
For the last several months, the community has been working to improve, clean up, and make your specification better than ever! This session will give you the "ins & outs" of the specification. You'll learn what's new, as well as what's on tap to be removed in 3.0. This is a "must" for all those building applications.

James Snell, Community Member

5:00 ~ 6:00

~ 3.0 Vision ~
OpenSocial 2.0's embedded experiences and action contributions pushed the boundary of where apps can be used. No more dashboards. No more navigating to a specific site. Now, the app comes to you: In your activity stream, In the content you're editing. In the result from your search. But what does the future hold for OpenSocial? As Alan Kay said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." In this session, we'll take that message to heart and outline the bold initiatives for OpenSocial 3.0. Here are some starting points:

Federated Activity Streams ~ SMTP fundamentally changed the way we work together. Activity Streams and OpenSocial are poised to be the next massive leap forward. Imagine working on a project with colleagues from another company. Instead of using email, you can use a cloud based project management application that sends activity streams to your social system. These activity streams entries contain an embedded experience that will open the project management app and let you collaborate with your colleagues on the project--even though they are from other companies!
 
RTC ~ There are a number of very exciting things going on with real time communications. OpenSocial have very little in the way of supporting this kind of integration. What would we need to provide to have applications participate in a "hangout" like social environment? What new and exciting apps would we enable with these kind of APIs?
Gamifcation ~ No, I don't mean Farmville. Gamification is about taking game mechanics and applying them to business problems to drive a desired set of results. However, in today's social systems, applications have no real way to "plug-in" to these gamification engines. As these business strategies become more prevalent, OpenSocial should provide an easy way for applications to participate in the "missions" and "quests" driven by gamification engines.

Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

~ Beer Forge: Shindig / Rave Meetup ~
It's a party!!! We're going to celebrate the release of OpenSocial 2.5, get psyched about starting on 3.0, and think about the next killer app! Come and join us on for some good fun and networking. Oh, and if you want to show off your latest wares, bring along your laptop!

Location TBD

"Beer Forge" ~ Apache Rave & Apache Shindig Meetup

Tuesday, July 17, 7:00pm - 10:00pm Spirit of 77

It's a party!!! We're going to celebrate another year of moving the social web forwad & the forthcoming release of OpenSocial 2.5, get psyched about starting on 3.0, and think about building the next killer social app!

Come and join us on for some good fun and networking. Oh, and if you want to show off your latest wares, bring along your laptop!

Make sure to RSVP (get a free ticket) so we can make sure we have enough beer for eveyone!

Developer BOF ~ Wednesday, July 18, 2012, @OSCON

Want to learn more about what's going on with OpenSocial? Come and meet us at the OSCON BOFs on Wednesday! We'll show some cool OpenSocial Apps, talk about what's new, and what's coming down the line. You'll get a chance to chat with some of the leading industry experts in the social business space. 

Logistics & Directions

The OpenSocial Foundation would like to extend a big "THANK YOU" in advance to Jive Software for hosting this year's event. Below is a map to Jive's Portland office, a.k.a. "Club Fed" (make sure to ask about the vault).