Social Desktop is winning Hackweek III award

Just to note it down, the social desktop hackweek project won the 3rd prize in the Best Overall Project category of openSUSE Hackweek III. That's a nice compliment for all the work and ideas which went into this project.

Social Desktop

This is a copy of the page from ideas.opensuse.org to preserve the information in case the system goes offline.

Description

We want to integrate the data on community web sites like http://opendesktop.org (or its child sites http://kde-look.org, http://kde-apps.org, http://gtk-apps.org, http://suse-art.org) with the desktop in order to extend applications by the most unique feature free software projects have: the community. The end result could be something like a “social desktop”, where people and the interaction with the community are a central element and provide extra value to the user.

Some ideas how this could be used were presented in the Akademy keynote KDE Community websites: The past, the present and a vision for the future by Frank Karlitschek. He also presented the first version of an API how to access community web sites, the Open Collaboration Web Services API. The specification can be found on freedesktop.org.

In order to make a first step towards the goal of the Social Desktop we want to implement the Open Collaboration Services API on opendesktop.org and a desktop client library and application to access the data.

Results

Server code is active on opendesktop.org. Client code is in SVN. It includes a first version of the client API, an Akonadi resource handling person data, a GUI application to query and show person and activity data, and a Plasma data engine for the destkop.

More results and documentation of the progress can be found in Cornelius' Hackweek Blog.

People

• Cornelius Schumacher works on the client library, an example UI, and the Akonadi integration
• Frank Karlitschek takes case of the server side
• Sebastian Trueg helps with Nepomuk integration
• Dirk Mueller works on a Plasmoid to show activity data on the desktop.

Related Materials

Open Collaboration Services Home Page

Hackweek 3 Resume

Hackweek is over for me now. I wrote a short summary in my regular blog.

Now with Akonadi

I started to write an Akonadi resource yesterday after dinner and today I have Attica fetching the people data from the Open Collaboration Services API through Akonadi working. This screenshot demonstrates it:



And here is the proof that it actually is Akonadi, the data shown in the Akonadi console:



It was amazingly easy. Writing the resource was a breeze, because it only took kapptemplate generating a template and then following the Akonadi Resource Tutorial step by step. For accessing the data from the UI I mainly took the examples from the Akonadi API Documentation and adapted them slightly to my needs and suddenly everything magically worked. Kudos to the people writing the Akonadi code and documentation. Fantastic job.

Code landed in SVN

The first code has landed in SVN. It's a small client app which operates the Open Collaboration Services API. You can get user profiles, search for users and show your activity log. Still a long way to go, but it's a nice start. The app has the working title "Attica", after the region of Greece where democracy was born.

Frank and me discussed the API in detail today and came up with a couple of changes. The backend of the app will have to be adapted once these changes are implemented on the server, but it shouldn't be a big deal. I still have to come up with some more abstraction of the REST access, though.

First Screenshot

After half a day of coding I'm ready to present my first screenshot:


Community users from www.opendesktop.org live on my desktop.

Research about Social Desktop

There is an interesting research paper about the Social Desktop: ContactMap: Organizing Communication in a Social Desktop. The authors investigate which social information on the desktop would help users to improve communication and other social tasks. They also come up with a prototype which looks pretty interesting.