University of Washington Emerging Technology

Steven is our speaker for our last Spark Session of the academic year. Feedsync is an Open Spec for Synchronization through Atom and RSS.

His team is connected to Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.

Feedsync was called simple file sharing for RSS. Oh, also Microsoft announced a new service recently, called Live Mesh and it has FeedSync baked in deep. (ugh, I hate that term, but it works.)

With feedsync the data is multi-master meaning it can come from and go to anywhere. All endpoints get the same result, eventually. As he points out, if I shut my laptop lid for two weeks it will be out of sync, but when I open up, the machine will sync to RSS feed.

It is protocol independent, lightweight, extensible and preserves conflicting data. which means that it doesn’t just keep the last one, or a merged version, but saves all version. They are hoping there will be creative Commons and Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

What are other ways to sync? iTunes to Ipod, Phone/PDA to PC, rsync and some of the new ways (sugarsync, dropbox, etc) are some examples of point to point syncing.

In the xml, some of the new tags, focus on giving it a unique id. URNs or other methods are ok. There is also sync metadata there too. there is also some history tags to differentiate who did what when and on what device, so that you can tell the update you did on your phone with the one you did on your laptop.

feedSync is not domain specific, meaning it works with email, music, web pages, voice data, etc. For example you can update your calendar from an evite or update the evite from your calendar. FeedSync takes care of the communication between the two services.
Here’s the audio recording for this first part of the talk. (length = 21:26)

He gives a demonstration where he adds a note with some to-do items on one laptop back at his desk via VPN and then goes the to laptop here at the podium, signs in to the service, and the notes app has his notes from the remote machine. When there is a conflict in editing, the notes gives you an alert.

they have examples that work in python, and .net.

For a real life example, he is talking about a project with a NGO in Afghanistan. The group needed to get information from office to office but the infrastructure in the country is minimal and slow. So the keep their data in MS Access files, and sync the data via a server connected by satellites. they figured out a way to send access databases via SMS. Who’d a thunk?
Here’s the audio recording for this second part of the talk. (length = 37:57)

Now he’s talking about Live Mesh, a technology preview announced by Microsoft, with a capacity 10,000 users who signed up for the service in the initial 2 hours that it was available.

Live Mesh is like a central station or desktop in the cloud. you connect all your devices to this desktop in the cloud. One Application is Live Folders, a shared folder across all your machines.
Here’s the audio recording for the last part of the talk. (length = 20:08)
Here are his slides:

Feedsync Presentation (ppt)

FeedSync Presentation (pptx)

I am attending the Web 2.0 Expo this week. Take a look at the sessions and if there is something you want me to attend - please let me know. I can’t promise I can make everything but I will do my best.

You can hit me back via comments on this post.

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This is a very high level summary of our evaluation. Please go to our wiki page to review detailed data related to this evaluation and a design spec. Yes it is UWNetID protected meaning that vendors will have to contact me via email if they want to discuss further.

The evaluation is based on Emerging Technology’s prototype work with our new community website along with conversations with others on campus who have either used or evaluated the products themselves. For a quick summary of what we think a community platform is all about see my previous post.

Thanks to our UW Technology SMVTT team who first showed us their work with community platforms a few months ago.

Please comment directly on the wiki or on this blog post. You can always email me as well.

Per our 2008-eTech roadmap for social software, some of our team members have been heads down over the past few weeks working on the evaluation of a few community platforms. The evaluation is specifically targeted at a UW Technology project to revamp the design of our current web presence.

Our current web presence is at http://www.washington.edu/computing and I think we can all agree it’s time for a fresh look and design. Rick Ells and his team in the communications group have been hard at work on a richer interactive design for quite some time now.

The new site design specifically calls for community features. This led us to explore a handful of community platforms that help websites either revamp or augment their current site to be rich communities and allow for peer-produced content. The introduction of these community platform products suggest that social networking and online communities are not destinations, but features which can be integrated into any website.

So what do I mean by social networking vs. online communities on the web?

Social networking to me is building your online profile and your network, searching for people you know, sustaining relationships, and building new relationships. Online communities are ways individuals can participate on a website such as comments, wikis, blogs, and voting as a community.

The eTech technology evaluation of community platforms is specific to the latter, however we are seeing an evolution of these platforms to include more social networking features like “Friends” and “Social Graphs”. We also see focused sites like our new UW Technology web presence serving niche communities desiring a community voice outside of the huge and generic social networking destinations (e.g., Facebook and MySpace).

Platforms we are actively exploring include:
* Movable Type’s Community Solution;
* Telligent’s Community Server; and
* UW Sharepoint Community Kit.

Common features of these community platform involve blogs, forums, user voting/rating, comments, profiles, tag/tag clouds, user activity news feeds, etc.

These solutions take the best features from various social web 2.0 sites like Digg.com, Flickr, Facebook and Delicious.

So what’s the big deal here?

As we all know social software and web 2.0 is big part of our computing lives such as socializing on Facebook, writing and reading blogs, uploading files and videos, voting on ideas, and participating in rich conversations on forums. The benefit of having these rich interactions on any website is helping attract a larger audience and involve visitors with a set of very rich interactive features. A community platform is one way a website can evolve from one-way read-only pages to ensuring our community around us feels like we engage with them actively over the web. Of course, communities on the Web are not the only way we pursue community development but it is important that being a technology organization, we have a strong, rich, interactive web presence for our UW community.

Will these solutions really allow campus websites to become a rich interactive location for our UW community? Is there any value and hope in moving away from email for communication and unto blogs and forums?

I guess only time will tell but for the time being we are hosting some brainstorming and eTech talk sessions around campus and we will be talking to Kexp.org, OIM, Catalyst, UW Technology and others. Please email me ttchang@u.washington.edu if you are interested in learning more or have questions. Also please comment away on this post if you want to discuss further.

In my next post I will share with you what we have learned so far with the evaluation of these products.

So I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5 today. Went fast and easy (too easy.) I also moved our MYSQL to the central hosted service. That was easy too.

But we have a problem with our HTML authentication plugin. The guy who wrote it, Daniel Westermann-Clark, down at University of Florida is aware of the problem, but hasn’t had the time to fix it yet. Drats.

I spent all of my time attending the social computing sessions. I think Sharepoint is heading in the right direction when it comes to social computing but a lot of work remains to be done. The Community Kit for Sharepoint is helping fill up the gaps in the blogs and wiki space and I wouldn’t be surprised to find some of its features in future versions of Sharepoint. In my opinion, some of the stuff in the Community Kit is a way to get MOSS 2007 caught up to products like Wordpress, Movable Type, Confluence, and MediaWiki.

Sharepoint 2007 does have some cool things related to social profiles, presence, people search and networking activities however the reliance on Active Directory as the primary data source to populate those scenarios might be a hurdle for some IT shops.

With that said I think the Sharepoint product team gets it and wants to do alot more in this space. I think we need to keep on top of this space with the Community Kit and Sharepoint to see where things go.

If anyone has differing or similar opinions on this please comment away!

Yea I know this is an old post but wanted to make sure I had all the meeting notes on our etech blog for consistency. Originally, I had this content posted on my staff website so that it would not intrude with our eTech roadmap postings.

Attendees:

Corey Murata
Lauren Ray
Melinda Van Wingen
Dylan Wilbanks
Rick Ells
Brandon Olsen
Melissa Albin
Zach Hale
David Cox
Bill Corrigan
Scott Macklin
Jeremiah Jester
John Burkhardt

Agenda:
1. List Facebook application ideas for the UW
2. Group Hug

Group Hug:

1. What do we want to do going forward?
2. What would you like to see more of from this group?
3. How should we continue to roll?

- Use the SIG to learn and evangelize the information within our respective groups.
- Learn about what our community wants and bring it back to the SIG
- Network with one another
- The Facebook group application is not working - no notifications and feeds so new information and discussions go unnoticed
- We might consider moving to Facebook Pages instead

Facebook Application Ideas:

1. Oxfordian Debate
- Providing pro and con content/information
- Use the web to allow users to comment, compare, debate
- Use social voting

2. Courses app
- student profile tool
- here are the different courses that I have taken
- finding study buddies and groups
- tie this into actual UW courses using the new UW courses webservices (still in beta)
- Faculty would like to ensure courses are mapped to learning goals
- Thru clicks on “interested” or “I am taking this class” a list of people in a group class lists is created thru the voluntary (opted in) action of the student or user

Current Facebook Courses are not sufficient
- There are 4 Facebook courses apps which are NOT supported by any specific University
- Not endorsed by the university

3. Research interests
- common research topics
- research keywords
- tag cloud
- feed notification during tagging

4. Libraries
- penntags
- social bookmarking for resources that people choose which can share
- DawgTags

5. RSS feed gateway
- all these feeds
- make a grand unified RSS vacuum
- pull all the stuff in the university
- aware of your interests

6. DAWGMarks
- Mapping activities of the UW using Google Maps
- Creating metadata on those activities using maps
- geotracking

8. Develop a tool for shared development on facebook

-Coding
-Application Requirements
-Testing
-Communication
-Design

9. Life - database in health sciences
- desire to find out where public health faculty are around the world
- Answers the question, what are they doing there in that part of the world?

An idea is to create a Facebook poll and get some votes to get an idea of which idea we should undertake first.

One year ago, in January of 2007, we launched C&C Emerging Technology. As we end our first year as a team, I want to take the opportunity to thank everybody in eTech for all of the good work that you’ve engaged in together during 2007. It is an honor for me to get to work with the truly talented people on this team - I know that I personally have learned a lot from all of you this year.

At the time I postulated four themes that we thought would be important in driving our work at the University of Washington during 2007:

1. The importance of the research activity as a driving force for the institution (or, as the Provost more eloquently put it, “Discovery is at the heart of our institution”).

2. To a large extent, science and scholarly activity have become “cyber-science” - that is, research methodologies are being transformed by the possibilities offered by computational power and mass data storage.

3. The emergence of broadly available computing and storage beyond the boundaries of the institution in the Internet “cloud” can enable activities at the UW in new and important ways.

4. The Internet will serve as the platform to enable a broad set of collaborative activities across the institution and among collaborators in multiple institutions across the globe.

During this year we have worked on multiple projects that exemplify those themes. In looking back on the year’s activities, I will admit to being surprised at the extent to which we actually accomplished what we set out to do - a look at the 2007 eTech Roadmap shows a great deal of forward progress! I’m particularly pleased at the success we’ve had in developing relationships with a wide variety of folks both inside the UW (our work with Media Relations, Marketing, the Alumni Association, Development, the units using Departmental Calendars, as well as a wide variety of technology professionals across the campuses) and with colleagues outside the UW (work with other universities and industry groups in middleware projects, our developing relationship with various groups at Microsoft, establishing contacts with Amazon and Google, among others).

Which leads me to add another theme that I think will be particularly important in our work in the coming year:

5. It’s the community, stupid!

Only by leveraging the power of the various communities we participate in will we be successful in our endeavors. This means that each of us should be spending increasing amounts of energy and time interacting with our friends, colleagues, and partners to help accomplish the aims of the University (so if you’re spending most of your time in your office with your door closed staring at your monitor, you really need to get out more).

One of the results of this theme will be that we will be spending considerable effort in 2008 working with others to understand how we can use technology to mobilize and engage communities. One of our first activities on this road will be to enlist the community of technology enthusiasts at the UW in helping us to determine what projects and tasks we should tackle in Emerging Technology during the coming year. In the next few weeks we’ll be posting the projects we’ve thought about to date and asking folks for what we’ve missed or what we’ve got wrong (or hopefully, what we’ve got right). It should be a fascinating opportunity to work with our own community to build shared understanding of priorities for the future.

I wish all of you a happy and healthy New Year, and I look forward to another year of work with all of you!

Attendees:

Zach Hale
Scott Macklin
David Cox
Melinda Van Wingen
Kathryn Sharpe
Tony Chang
Hanson R. Hosein
Amar Nehru
Lauren Ray

Main Agenda:

We received a visit from Hanson Hosein (UW Communications Digital Media Group) and Amar Nehru, a former Microsoftie, who gave us a presentation about an innovative idea they have around social software & networking sites for important social causes. We were able to give them the feedback they needed to help shape some of their ideas and also determine if there were any opportunities for partnerships.

I wont be able to post any specific material from the presentation as it is currently considered confidential however Hanson and Amar would welcome anyone interested in learning more and possibly partnering with them to contact them.

Some things that we can share about our time together:

We talked about various sites already existing and some of the pros and cons of each:

Facebook causes
Change.org
CharityNavigator
Idealistic
TakingITGlobal

We talked about better ways to make decisions on various charity organizations based on objective and user submitted data such as ranking and rating of organizations.

Amar sees a philanthropic trend with the current college and younger generation. The idea of being relevant in today’s society as it pertains to making global differences is powerful among that generation. They foresee a website where individuals who share common interests can do something socially to facilitate change and have a market place for socially relevant action.

Amar and Hanson sees alot of potential and opportunities to partner with the University of Washington in helping them develop and endorse a new website that can empower society using social web2.0 concepts. They see the new UW global mission as being in direct alignment with their goals and vision for their website. The question remains on how these types of engagements occur at the UW and how can TechTransfer get involved.

Other topics:

Updates on ongoing projects that are bring social web 2.0 features on campus.

If you are interested in our Social Software Special Interest Group please join our Facebook group http://washington.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19460730848

Oren, Tony, and I, along with Scott Baker of the iSchool and Tom Lewis of Catalyst had a lively discussion with representatives of Microsoft’s Higher Education units yesterday regarding ways SharePoint could grow to be a better collaboration tool in the learning and teaching space. They presented us with a well thought out proposal for creating a consortium to develop services and Web Parts around workflow in the educational process. This new group would create a gradebook and integrate testing functionality and showcase it by the end of 2007.

We all had a good time talking about integrating such useful tools as Sharepoint, Catalyst, Blackboard, Sakai, and Moodle as well as others in the teaching and learning landscape. Some of us felt the role of monolithic systems for learning management weren’t appropriate for heterogeneous places like UW, others felt that really good systems that are easy to use and have lots of functionality have great success stories to support their deployment.

We also talked about the role of Federated Identity through systems such as Shibboleth and the need to think in terms of Software as Service more than creating Web Part front ends. How can we ensure that Sharepoint implementations would work with varying authentication services and connect with emerging technologies such as Web Services?

I was intrigued and appreciative that Microsoft would come over and engage with us over this idea. We recommended some other schools to talk with and promised to continue the conversation.

Are you using Share Point for teaching and learning? Please comment on what you think could be done to improve it, or drop me a line if you want more information.