Social Networking Workshop Report

On January 15, I woke up early in the morning from a dream where one of the presenters of the Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, that was to start that day and that I was co-chairing, was asking me to find a tape player so that she could accompany her presentation with a dance. I probably realized this was a dream when a tape player was mentioned - I guess my subconscious still need to catch up with the digital music era.

I don't know if I should be happy or sorry that this didn't actually happen, but I am quite happy with the two days of the great discussions at the workshop, and the plans we have started to make to follow-up on these points.

We've just released today the report that summarizes the discussions and conclusions of the workshop (with an accompanying press release), but it's hard to make justice in a few pages to all the energy and rich exchanges that went on during the meeting among the 90 or so participants, fed by the 72 submitted papers.

Among the identified next steps, the creation of one or more Incubator Groups to continue to work initiated on interoperability mapping, privacy best practices, and decentralized architectures is moving ahead, supported by the ongoing discussions in the publicly archived mailing list <public-social-talk@w3.org>, where already 80 people have subscribed to follow up generally on the conversations started in the workshop.

If that topic is of interest to you, make sure to join that list, and stay tuned as the concrete next steps are being implemented!