Cooperation on the Social Desktop

[Frank Karlitschek <frank openDesktop org>]

Hi everyone,

first of all, let me explain you who I am. My name is Frank Karlitschek
I'm the founder and maintainer of openDesktop.org network. As some of  
you may know which contains GNOME-Look.org, GTK-Apps.org, KDE- 
Look.org, KDE-Apps.org and many similar sites with over 130.000  
registered Linux users.
More information can be obtained on openDesktop.org.
I´m also the creator of the Social Desktop idea which will be  
implemented in KDE in the future. The idea of the Social Desktop and  
the Open Collaboration Services is to have a cross desktop standard  
for all Linux Desktops.

I read the interview with Luis Villa on LWN.net about GNOME and its  
foundation. He mentioned there the Social Desktop idea of the KDE  
project. So I as a main creator of this idea sent him an email in  
which I wanted to explain the whole story an asked if the GNOME  
project is interested in working together with us. He seemed  
interested but unfortunately he isn't developing inside the GNOME  
project anymore. Advised by him, I would like to present you the  
vision of the (cross desktop) Social Desktop to spread our idea and  
vision and to collaborate between both big desktop environments.

Actually the Social Desktop was from the beginning on a cross desktop  
idea for open source desktops. I think it is important that the open  
source desktops have several unique features to be more attractive for  
interested new user or Windows and Mac switchers. This is one of the  
most promising way to gain new fans, potential developers and even  
customers. It's one on the few ways I see to gain more market share in  
the world.
Furthermore social interaction between people becomes more important  
than ever. Communicating over the Internet via mails, forums and  
internet platforms is just normal. Just think of the web 2.0 and  
facebook etc.
The concept behind the Social Desktop now is to bring the power of  
online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and  
the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the free  
software community is its worldwide community of contributors and  
users who belief in free software and who work hard to bring the  
software and solutions to the mainstream.
A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the  
community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate  
into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas is e. g. to  
place a widget on the desktop where users can find other GNOME and/or  
KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to  
these people, to contact them and to collaborate.
After the first installation of a Linux distribution users normally  
have questions. At the moment a lot of the support for them is  
provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a  
browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The  
community is relatively loosely connected, it is spread all over the  
web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the  
information found somewhere out on the web. Although is works  
relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost.
Showing a user near you with a picture of him, a face to remember  
could be very helpful for them. Access to a lot of user-generated  
information offers a great way to provide online community support.  
This user-generated content comes from different sources. At the  
moment openDesktop.org, GNOME-Look.org and other sites implements the  
spec but we are working with other projects to have other data sources  
in the future, so people can help each other via the web, and  
application developers transparently integrate this knowledge into  
applications and the desktop.
An event system is also going to be part of the Social Desktop. Every  
user is free to register new events e.g. a Linux conference in London,  
a developer meeting in Berlin or just a little barbecue in a backyard.  
This event will be listed in the events database and other users can  
"join" the event. New participants can be invited to take part in  
events, friends get automatically informed via the friend newsfeed  
that some of their friends go to an event. The date, a short  
description and a location is enough to start a new event. Locations  
get directly displayed via an OpenStreetMap applet provided by the  
free wiki world map on each event page.
Many of this planed features are already visibly and usable via our  
site openDesktop.org but many of them could be hooked in the desktop  
via application integration or applets.
We invite people to work with us on the community integration of the  
Social Desktop. There are many ideas...
The backend of the Social Desktop is designed to be platform  
independent. Its features are based on the OCS API, Online  
Collaboration Services API. The OCS API was developed by me.
The API spec is published on freedesktop.org so third party provider  
are able to implement OCS API which is very welcomed. So the KDE Forum  
already announced that they are going to integrated OCS.
What do you think?
It would be great if KDE and GNOME could work together at this topic  
which has a huge potential in the future.

I'm looking forward to your reply.


Cheers
Frank




--
Frank Karlitschek
frank openDesktop org