Hackweek 3

Next week is hackweek time again. It's the third SUSE hackweek, which means we are doing this for more than a year now. Hackweek has created lots of interesting projects and some of the results have significantly improved our distribution.

Last hackweek I was too busy with other interesting stuff, but this time I will fully participate again. The project I plan to work on is the Social Desktop. That's inspired by the keynote Frank Karlitschek gave at Akademy this year. He proposed some ideas how to get the community on the desktop, how desktop applications could be enriched by making use of the data and functionality which is available on community web sites like opendesktop.org.

One example he gave was an about dialog on steroids, which would provide more info about the people behind the applications, and would also give users a way to become a "fan" to visibly be part of the user community of an application.



Another interesting use case Frank presented was integration of online content in the help center. Lots of info about how to use application is in online forums these days and it would be great, if the user would get more direct access to this info by integrating it into the help center.



Frank has already implemented a first version of the API on opendesktop.org, so what we now need is a client implementation on the desktop. This involves questions like how to best access the REST API, how to handle authentication through OpenID, and how to make the information accessible in a useful way for applications to use it. I'm looking forwared to work on findind answers to these questions.