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Tag Archive for 'api'

Drupal Communities meet Real Life

Published by on 10 November 2008 at 17:49 in Uncategorized. 11 Comments Tags: , , , .

I just read midsch’s posting about his helplessness in the hospitality exchange scene… He described the different situations quite good. However, my view on it and the possibilities connected to it are not as dark than his are…

It does not matter if CouchSurfing, HospitalityClub, GlobalFreeLoaders, BeWelcome… hospitality exchange pages have numerous times been described as the most useful sites in the web as they bring people together in real life. Since then numerous new hospitality exchange communities popped up to establish their own community.

But why establish your own community in times of Facebook APIs, Open Social and Drupal? Why not connect all those different communities together? Why not develop a Drupal module (http://www.drupal.org) that
offers all those established communities the possibilities to meet each other in real life?

I started a project on Amazee.com (as I have been around there when I wanted to bring the thing on paper), devoted to the development of a Drupal module for decentralized hospitality sites. Let us continue to learn from each other – here in the web, but also in real life. So why not spent our energy in this way?

http://www.amazee.com/drupal-communities-meet-real-life

Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

Published by on 07 September 2007 at 20:02 in Member Rights and Transparency. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Besides the couchsurfers who care about the openness of our precious not so little network, the call for open social networks is getting louder and louder. On CS it might be flogging dead horses but our experiences will strengthen other hospitality exchange networks (and our presence will attract the right people to the right networks).

I’m sure that anyone who supports OpenCouchSurfing will support the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

  • Ownership of their own personal information, including:
    • their own profile data
    • the list of people they are connected to
    • the activity stream of content they create;
  • Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
  • Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

  • Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
  • Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
  • Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
  • Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington, September 4, 2007

Looking from the rapid spread of this bill of rights, I dare to say, that we’re not alone, by far not alone.