Cambridge Heavyweights Launch SocialPhysics
A group of folks from Cambridge Massacussetts have launched a program dubbed "The SocialPhysics Initiative". It has some heavy weight names behind it like Lawrence Lessig and Ester Dyson.
The two primary goals of the program are as follows:
- Create a robust, multi-disciplinary, multi-constituency community for addressing, vetting and conducting experiments in such issues as privacy, authentication, reputation, transparency, trust building and information exchange.
- Develop a reusable, open source software framework based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform that provides core services including: identity management, social network data models, authentication management, encryption, and privacy controls. On top of this framework we are also developing a demo app that provides identity management and social networking functions, tools to create peer-to-peer identity sharing and facilities to support communities of interest around emerging topics.
Nothing is available for downoad yet. However, let's all hope that this gets more traction than a similar eclipse based collaboration app developed also at Cambridge. That is the Haystack Universal Information Client.
Coincidentally with this, the Eclipse consortium has announced the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF). There could be potentially a lot of synergies between these two projects. Afterall, communication is the foundation of any collaborative social interaction.
