Today we were joined by Richard Gomer, who is acting as a critical friend to Tag4Fun and provides an external viewpoint on the project.
This week we started by discussing and finalising the scope of idea. There were some concerns about the decentralisation being too much additional work on top of the front end, although we came to an agreement that the scope should be fixed at the current point (decentralised open-source storage and commercial front end).
We also discussed a number of technical details such as how the servers storing the tags communicate ownership of a domain or user, and how a site owner specifies which server they wish to use. This showed that it isn’t specified clearly enough on the blog presently and we will work to explain it better in future blog posts.
We realised that privacy has not been covered in enough detail on the blog and if anyone is to take this project seriously we need to clearly state how privacy will be protected. This includes who is allowed to tag another person, who is allowed to remove that tag, and who is allowed to view tags (and in what way). This will be covered on the blog soon.
The browser plugin, which was a big part of the original project vision but has been neglected recently in favour of the decentralisation portion, was mentioned again. The group felt that this is still a strength to the project and should be completed in line with the other goals. This will be another topic needing to be covered more completely on the blog.
With the easter holiday approaching we also needed to decide what needed to be completed in the coming week, as we attempt to bring the project to a close. It was decided that by the end of next week the following work would be complete:
The welcome & project brief would be modified by Jonny to include the new work done on decentralisation.
An analysis of existing decentralised social networking tools will be completed by Deep.
Sumair, Deep, and Bharat will write up the results of research into academic work related to decentralisation and linked data.
Bharat will write about news related to decentralised social networks in the tech media.
Sumair will attempt to gain input from webmasters about the idea of decentralised tagging.
Jonny will continue development of the prototype, including producing mockups, uml diagrams, and storyboards.
Larry will produce scenarios and personas which cover the features in a more formal manner than we have discussed so far. This will cement exactly where the project is going.
The protocol for peer to peer communication between servers will be documented by Jonny, and the OpenID protocol will be documented by Larry.
Larry will also conduct a usability evaluation of the current version of the software with potential end users.