Discovering and Encouraging Open Standards for our
Open Source / Free Social Network
August 10-12, 2007 - Austin Texas
THE VISION The Transparent Federal Budget project (TFB) is to increase the transparency and accountability of our political processes. It will consist of a community-built legislation database, an intuitive web-based database UI, and a social network to tie each database contribution to the author's identity and reputation. Visit the Transparent Federal Budget site for more information.
We intend for this project to have a substantial, positive impact on this country, and this means knocking down as many barriers to participation as possible. To this end, a key proposal of ours is to create a social networking open standard, allowing users of existing social networking sites to participate in the TFB social network and community using their existing identities.
WORKSHOP GOALS The "We Are All Actors" workshop has been conceived as a way to bring together all of the constituents for the TFB project -- leaders, users, partners, and advisors. This workshop's primary goal is to have our key user groups present use cases that convey and (with your input!) refine a common vision of what this project can become.
The social networking open standard will require collaboration between several partners. Therefore, a secondary goal of this workshop is to agree on a set of high-level requirements that the open standard will address, and to create a working team and timeline for drafting the actual standard.
WORKSHOP THEME A key concept we are proposing in the social networking open standard is the concept of the "actor." Future social networks could better represent real-world networks by linking not only individuals, but organizations, businesses, even concepts, all of which can be generalized as "actors.
This gives rise to our event's theme of a stage drama, complete with three "acts" (working sessions), a full cast of actors (participants),and themed meals and entertainment!
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