Title: SocialPhysics And The Higgins Trust Framework
Subtitle: Kaliya says that SocialPhysics has to come and talk about what we are doing

Author Names: Mary Ruddy, Paul Trevithick, Co-founders SocialPhysics.org

^^Abstract:

This session will introduce the SocialPhysics community and provide an overview of its Higgins Trust Framework, an open source project at the Eclipse Foundation.

SocialPhysics is a project whose goal is to help bring about a new commons, the “social web.” The social web is a layer built on top of the Internet to provide a trusted way to link people, organizations, and concepts. It will provide people more control over their digital identities, the ability to more easily find other people and groups, and more control over how they are seen by others across diverse contexts.

The project, staffed by volunteers and affiliated with the Berkman Center at Harvard, has three components: research, community sponsorship and open source software development.

1. Our research focuses on the “physics” behind social interactions and the emergence of trust through various kinds of reciprocity and exchange as well as working on the legal and policy issues. Last academic year, we hosted a seminar series inviting presenters from a wide range of disciplines.
2. Our community sponsorship component hosts the SocialPhysics.org website and mailing lists, the Identity Gang wiki, and an annual one day workshop. Our goal is to foster dialogue that can help organize the efforts of many separate groups and individuals who share a common vision of user-empowerment.
3. Our software development efforts are centered on the creation of the Higgins Trust Framework, an open source technology sub-project of the Eclipse Foundation.

^^More about Higgins…

Higgins is a software framework that makes it easy to manage identity information (including rich profiles, presence, etc.) and social networks within and across multiple heterogeneous (new or existing) computer mediated contexts.

The framework relies entirely on plug-ins to implement these contexts. A context can represent any kind of group such as a project team, department, association, informational network, family, customer group, or supplier network. Context plug-ins are envisioned to range from directories such as LDAP servers, identity management systems, mailing list and social networking systems, to collaboration spaces such as file repositories and other shared spaces, to communications networks such as email, IM or voice.

This session will review the:

• Objectives of the Higgins Trust Framework project
• Framework architecture and example
• Advantages for users
• Advantages for developers