Groups, Lists, Communities
Simply grouping people seems to be a need. It was discussed in the thread Differentiating OSW shortly.
The major poles of communication/sharing today is on the one side
- person to person communication/sharing, on the other side
- publishing.
In between lays the realm of communication/sharing to a selected but stable amount of users. Such stability of the group has different aspects. Such is listed in the needs section including some “definition”.
The word “groups” is not specific enough and therefor used if lists and communities are meant.
- lists: a amount of JIDs named generically that is relative to a user (same list name at different users but different JIDs in the list dependent on the list owner). e.g. the many users may have the list “family” or “home” and that list will contain always different JIDs for each user.
- communities: a amount of JIDs fixed. They can be open or “managed” by a owner.
- roles: in lists there are the roles “owner” and “partitipant”. In Communities there is a managing owner and possibly several types of partitipants.
- It should be possible to migrate a list into a community. Most relevant in this migration is that the community must have a unique identifier per server which itself is a JID.
To make grouped communication/sharing mainstream the core is raising the level of usability. Many social networks business model require them to default to publishing. OSW can differentiate her, based on its different model.
- one-click communication/sharing to a group
- recommendation engine to build groups on-the-go. e.g. one communicates to 4 JIDs 2 times this is suggested as a group (list or community can be selected).
- lookup for JIDs on typing (done).
If anyone has some UI flows, wireframes, or other ideas, please share ! One other question is: do we need to change something in the protocol to acomodate these other kind of UIs?
Building a signet language for the major lists of users. A signet language e.g. is used for olympic sports and interpreted differently every 4 years. The singular graphics are also called pictograms.
- core-people (3-5 most closest ties)
- family (parants and brothers/sisters)
- home (the people you life with; group correlated by home phone number)
- work (people you know through work)
- life (people you know not through work)
- friends (as in facebook and other social software; super group of all the former; not containing the typical outlook-contact)
- contacts (all other contacts in your address-book; with those you are not connected)
- work team (subgroup of company, unit, division)
- project team
- relatives (people you are related to but not your family; super group of family)
- sports team (subgroup of sports club and league)
- company, unit, division
- sports- or hobby club
- sports league
As an metaphorical example
- the olympic sport sign alphabets are good to analyse Olympic sports signs=
- several topics in blue glowing signs
For communities the corporate or NGO-logos should be used. Ownership must be transferable. This way the user-community can start building groups.