Open Source Social Software

social networking services & educational communities

About Emerge

The Emerge project is an innovative 28 month consortium-based project. Its primary aim is to support the creation of a sustainable community of practice (CoP) that will develop and exploit new emergent technologies (e.g. social software, pervasive computing) for use in educational settings.

Project hub Event management Synchronous events & meetings

“ To act as a conduit and pathway for the range of locations inhabited by all participants.To channel and enhance the reach of content from existing community members, whether working in single or multiple locations. To scaffold the online practice, work and communication of the group. To organise, store and aggregate the project documentation, map development… The hub will allow the project team to support participants to create overlapping individual and group personalised web 2.0 environments that most suit their needs and preferences. The emphasis will be on the circulation and identification of distributed content, allowing participants to work and to have a presence across multiple sites, and dialogue across locations.”

Why Open Source?

Opportunity for project to contribute in terms of profile raising

Modeling good practice

Focus resources on supporting community

Ideally, contribute to development

Ownership & flexibility

Best tool for the job

Some Issues

Mixed user group in terms of confidence with and preference for SNS organisational structure

Search functionality and practices, including tagging

Disputes over aggregation practices & context

Institutional, professional, personal activity

OS Social Networking

AroundMe http://www. barnraiser .org/ - three social tools, OpenID-based

Elgg - Classic & 1.0 http://elgg.org/

Dolphin - http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/

OS Social Networking

Inoshi - http://portal. insoshi .com/

Lovdbyless http://lovdbyless.com/

- both Ruby on Rails

Mahara http://www.mahara.org

Open Source Social News

Drupal Vote up/down module - http: //drupal .org/project/vote_up_down discontinued for version 6

Drupaligg http://drupaligg.com/ built over Drupal

Newscloud - http://www.newscloud.com/

Pligg - http://www.pligg.com/

Open Source Social Bookmarking

GetBoo http://www.getboo.com/

Scuttle http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/

Unalog - http://unalog.com

OS Video Hosting

Plumi video sharing http://plumi.org

Showinabox http://showinabox.tv/ - for WordPress video blogs

FilmForge http://filmforge.koumbit.net/ - video for Drupal

OS Microblogging

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

Laconica - http://laconi.ca/

OS virtual worlds

OpenSource Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/

Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/

NMC Open Virtual Worlds Project http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-launches-open-virtual-worlds-project - extension of Sun Microsystem s’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland

Developments to watch:

Buddy Press http://buddypress.org/ Open Source project creating plug-ins to turn Wordpress Multi-User in to a social network platform.

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

OU SocialLearn platform development http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/index.php (leaning towards OS)

Wikia’s Social Profile extension for Mediawiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile

Current & future issues

Data portability - online identity, contacts, relationships, personal details, media & assets - about standards and interoperability but also about user experience design & support.