Session Abstract

State-of-the art community collaboration and course management tool suites must span intra-institutional boundaries, be easily customized and extensible, encompass best-of-breed and monolithic applications, and enable Facebook-style social computing via community and personal activity streams.

With Duke University's Toolkits application, users define communities that are expressed as Grouper groups controlling access and rights for a set of online tools selected by the community manager. This allows easy creation and management of ad-hoc online communities across independent apps such as Wordpress, Sakai, Sympa lists, XMPP/Jabber, Cisco's Quad, Webfiles, Confluence, etc. To reach the broadest possible audience, Toolkits works with federated identities spanning both InCommon and OpenID.

But a community's collection of tools is of little value if members are unable to easily see what others are doing and view the history of the community. Toolkits addresses these needs with an application-independent activity stream service using the activitystrea.ms schema to track and display user actions, providing a Facebook-style "wall" for individuals and the community that can be viewed in each of the community's applications.

Beyond demonstrating and describing Toolkits, we will discuss lessons learned and future direction for federated activity stream services (such as OpenBuddyCloud and Diaspora) in social-computing enabled applications.