Authors:  James Hogan, Sofia Martinez

Overview

The goal is to create a social network which will be the backbone of the LoTV.  It will help techies find each other, communicate, and collaborate to make a difference in politics and government.

The social network conceived here differs from a standard social network in four key ways:

• Entity-based -- the network contains "entities", which can be an individual or a group, rather than just individuals
• Interoperable -- able to integrate with other compatible social networks to effectively function as one "meta-network"
• Identity and reputation (to be added later) -- integrated throughout so people can make intelligent decisions about who to work with on what

• Collaboration tools (under separate development) -- like the consensus wiki.  Use to actually accomplish things together!

Entity Types

• Individual
• Group
  • Either subgroups or tags: e.g. corporation, non-profit, social

Relationship Types

No trust is implied with a relationship. Trust will be handled elsewhere, in a future reputation component. Testimonials will be attached to entities as part of the trust component.

i == individual, g == group

    Friend (symmetric, accepted)

    I <-> i  

    Member of (non-symmetric, accepted)

    G -> g, i-> g

    Supporter (non-symmetric, not accepted)

    i->g, g->g, g->I, i->i

    Partner (symmetric, accepted)

    G<->g, i<->g

    Individuals partnered with individuals use Friend -- "partner" is essentially a "business friendship"

On top of this, there will be tags or subgroups to optionally illustrate 'flavors' of a relationship type, but those will cause no differences in behavior.

Basic use cases

Part of any social network!

Framework

    Create account

    Delete account

    Sign in

    Sign out

View

    User profle

    User relationships

    User blog

Search

    On user profile keywords

Communicate

    Email users

    Relationship requests (send / accept / remove)

Meta-network use cases

Specific use cases that are necessary when you bring interoperability with other compatible social networks into the picture.  These will be implemented later, but the software framework should be easily extensible to allow them.

Filters

    Per-network: Filter Incoming data

    Per-network: Filter Outgoing data

    Users: Refine (not expand) outgoing filters

List

    Networks on meta network

    Number of users on a network

Search

    On network profile keywords

        This implies a network profile (eg, topic, #users, goal, location)

View

    Network profile