Background

The Web is not only hyperlinks, but also encompasses the social relationships that link humanity together. Driven by social networking, micro-blogging, and open data, this Social Web is becoming a vital mode of communication across wider and wider sections of the planet, with innovative and disruptive effects.

Currently the Social Web exists as a number of “closed silos” that limit their users to relationships with those who have accounts on the same site. If the Web is to remain a universal information space, the Social Web should allow users to communicate across the entire Web, in a similar manner to how e-mail and telephones allow us to communicate across diverse networks regardless of the particular provider.

Diverse social networking sites could federate using inter-operable standards to share social data like status updates. To make this vision a reality on a truly large-scale, more work on standardization, policy, test cases, and more experimentation and experience with actual deployment and code are needed.

There are also new requirements, as increasingly users must further be able to trust the Social Web to allow them to communicate securely with their peers and have their privacy respected. Both legal policy-based approaches to the handling of personal information related to social networking and strong cryptographic technology can be leveraged to improve the current state of the art in decentralized social network services. In the long-run, our society will be more and more dependent on the exchanges done via social networking services, so architectures and standards for the Social Web should therefore be designed to be robust and resilient against attack.

The workshop aims to capture, discuss and address the challenges and the potential of innovations in the federated social network space. The workshop will kick off with talks and panels on Friday June 3rd, to be followed by discussion of position papers about possible future standards and architectures. Afterwards, an open space will begin on Saturday June 4th and early Sunday June 5th, to enable further discussion, collaborative coding, development and experimentation.

Goals and Scope

This workshop intends to bring together communities building federated social networking code-bases with those involved in privacy and identity. It will be the second conference, following up on the original Federated Social Web Summit in Portland in 2010, but now with a focus on privacy protection in the social web and the cloud. As it is a W3C Workshop, it will have one day for position papers and discussion. To continue the tradition of the Federated Social Web Summit in Portland in 2010 and attract more developers, the summit will also have a open-space, including opportunities for collaborative coding and open talks, for an entire day.

Topics for discussion and position papers may include, but are not limited to:

* Showcasing interoperability and federation across different social network code-bases, such as the SWAT0 test-cases
* Concrete lessons learned from social networking interoperability code-bases
* Detailing privacy requirements for the Social Web and mapping these into concrete technical proposals and considerations.
* Analysis of attack threats and possible solutions for social networking
* Policy-based approaches to the Social Web that allow one to communicate and share data across specified target audiences.
* Considerations from identity management in social networking.
* Implications of cloud-based social networking on security and privacy, including proposals for privacy-preserving or “private” clouds.
* Improving the user experience for federated social networking
* The role of devices such as mobile, augmented reality, and phones in federated social networking.
* Research on user behavior and privacy in social networks.

The workshop is expected to attract a broad set of stakeholders, including developers, privacy and security experts, advocates, and entrepreneurs in the space of social web.

Workshop/Conference format
This conference uses a mix of different approaches, including

* invited talks for the introduction – on Friday June 3rd,
* presentation of position papers, to set the scene, on Saturday June 4th, and
* open space methodology to further progress coding on late Saturday June 4th and Sunday June 5th
* Plus, of course, plenty of room for socializing

In order to present on Saturday, the submission of a position paper by May 2nd is required. For sessions during the open space, a pre-announcement over the W3C Federated Social Networking list-serv is recommended, but not obligatory.

You do not need to be a member of W3C to participate in this workshop, but the total number of participants will be limited due to the constraints of the space. To ensure diversity, a limit might be imposed on the maximum number of participants per organization. We advise early registration.

There will be a marginal registration fee of 15 Euro in order for us to prevent possible over-subscription. Income from this fee will help bear the costs of the Workshop.

Venue
The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung is located next to Friedrichstraße in the center of Berlin.

Website: boell.de

Deliverables
Position papers, agenda, accepted presentations, and a report will also be published online. Streaming facilities are under consideration.

Workshop Organization
Workshop sessions and documents will be in English. Interpretation for German may be available for the talks on Friday.

Chairs
Evan Prodromeu, Status.Net
Jan Schallaböck, ULD

Expression of Interest
To help the organizers plan the workshop: If you wish to participate, please as soon as possible send a message to fsw11-submission_ATT_perglobal.org with a short “expression of interest” stating:

* that a representative from your organization plans to submit a position paper
* how many participants you plan on sending (we suggest one or two per organization)
* whether or not you wish to make a presentation in the open-space part of the conference.

Note: Sending that expression of interest does not mean that you registered for the workshop. For presenting on Saturday it is still necessary to send a position paper (see below), which then must be considered for acceptance by the Program Committee. However, submitting a position paper is not required for participation.

Position Papers
You paper must meet the following criteria:

* explains your interest in the Workshop
* aligned with the Workshop’s stated goals as outlined above.
* 1 to 5 pages long
* may be linked to a demo of existing code
* formatted in (valid) HTML/XHTML, PDF, or plain text

Based on a review of all submitted position papers, the Program Committee will choose a small number of papers judged most appropriate for fostering discussion, and ask the authors of those papers to give short presentations about them at the workshop. After the workshop, those presentations will then be published on the workshop home page, along with copies of all position papers.

Please send your submissions meeting the above to fsw11-submission_ATT_perglobal.org by May 2nd 2011.

Important dates
25th March Call for Participation issued
2nd May Deadline for position papers
7th May Acceptance notification sent
15th May Program released
3rd – 5th June Workshop

Program committee

* Blaine Cook – British Telecom (BT)
* Claudio Venezia – Telecom Italia
* Dan Brickley – Vrije Universitat Amsterdam
* Fabien Gandon – INRIA
* Florian Walther – Blogger, Security-Expert
* Harry Halpin – World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
* Henry Story – Apache Software Foundation
* Ian Brown – Oxford Internet Institute (OII)
* Jan Lennardt – CouchOne
* Soeren Preibusch – University of Cambridge
* Jan Schallaböck – PerGlobal
* Karsten Gerloff – Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)
* Marit Hansen – Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz (ULD)
* Markus Sabadello – Project Danube
* Matt Lee – GNU Social
* Michael Hanson – Mozilla
* Mischa Tuffield – Garlik
* Rigo Wennig – W3C
* Ronald Leenes – Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT)
* Thomas Roessler – W3C
* Yme Bosma – Hyves
* Alexander Passant – DERI
* Ben Werdmuller – von Elgg