[drupal-devel] Google Summer of Code: Social context of content

[Robert Douglass]

Hi Kieran,

It rocks. Is this an individual's application or are you proposing we 
put it on the SoC pages and hope that someone applies for it? Do you 
know anyone who would be interested in applying?

If this is a suggestion for a project that we should be doing please add 
it to the SoC page quickly as the application deadline is the 14th and 
I've noticed a marked slowing in the number of people mailing me with 
applications to review. If we want to get people to apply for this 
project then we not only have to move quickly but also put word out on 
the grapevine that we want applicants.

-Robert

Kieran Lal wrote:
> Hello, please review this proposal and provide feedback for 
> consideration as a Google summer of code project for Drupal.
> 
> The social context of content is important in evaluating content.
> 
> User questions this is trying to answer: 
> Who is the person everybody reads?
> Who was there when the subject of the content happened?   
> What are your friends reading?
> What is relevant for your next social meeting? 
> What it is the socially relevancy of media such as pictures or video?
> 
> The goal of this project is to allow for the descriptions of content in 
> a social context and to automatically discover the social context of 
> content.  The first phase will be to create a standard set of social 
> tags for describing individuals, their relationships, and 
> their activities.  These descriptions will be done using the 
> taxonomic tagging module in Drupal and it's forthcoming customer 
> relationship management module.   The automated discovery of the social 
> context of content will be the second phase.   This will allow social 
> context to be derived from information that is available but not 
> coordinated.  This will include user page views, authorship, number of 
> reads, response rate weighting, interaction of buddy list contacts, 
> social weight of readers, responders social weight , events, 
> locative information, volunteer, and invitation information which are 
> all currently available in Drupal modules.
> 
> Why this is innovative?  Content management has currently focused 
> on supporting varieties of content, transcoding content, and 
> integration of content with other systems but has done little to state 
> why it is socially relevant to people.  This project aims to enable 
> producers, consumers, and managers of content to describe content in a 
> socially relevant manner.  It also aims to discover how users want to 
> describe the social context of content and how they prefer to consume 
> that information.  Drupal's well defined schema allows for discovery of 
> social context in structured data that is presented to users in an 
> unstructured way.
> 
> Deliverables
> Part I: Social context tagging
> An open standard for referencing individuals, their relationships, 
> and their activities.   This will be an open standard for 
> Community Relationship Management based on the CiviCRM open standard, 
> SugarCRM, foaf, xfn, rojo (proprietary), aura (codecon 2005), and 
> SalesForce for non-profits.
> A database file with this standard taxonomy, and possible folksonomy 
> extensions.
> An interface for the module which allows social context tags to 
> be effectively displayed with content.
> An interface for allowing users to add social context tags or 
> extend their own tags.
> Part II: Automatic discovery of social context.
> A module that drills across content management tables for social context 
> information and creates a table with the total social context of content 
> nodes.  This will be done in off-line batch modes as a series of data 
> warehousing style queries.  This will be architected to include queries 
> to other data marts.
> 
> Interested Googlers who would benefit from this open source project
> Danah Boyd from Blogger and Ellen Spertus from Orkut would be able to 
> benefit from research into social context prototypes.
> 
> Academic references
> This project was inspired at the Computer Human Interaction conference 2005.
> One paper from Microsoft described the need for social context of 
> content in Microsoft Outlook rather than meta-data such as file size, 
> date, and urgency.
> One paper in the short papers section described how a photo of young 
> people in a car on a trip could be socially relevant because it could 
> have been the author's nephew who died on a similar car trip.  This 
> illustrates the power of social context of content.
> A paper from Microsoft analyzing Usenet post meta-data showed that power 
> users were most interested in what the most respected people in a 
> community were saying.
> References to papers and academic relevancy will be added to this proposal.
>