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The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

http://openwebfoundation.org/

Optaros has written a streamlined web client for Alfresco based entirely on REST (web scripts) and ExtJS. It is called DoCASU, which stands for Document Access for Casual Users, and we’re making it freely-available as an open source project on code.optaros.com.

DoCASU 1.0 leverages the understanding gained from corporate user requirements and utilizes Rich Internet Application technologies such as the ExtJS AJAX framework. DoCASU is not intended to replace the already existing Alfresco web user interface, but rather offer an alternative for users who require a limited set of features for them to profit from simplicity and ease of use. Already today thousands of users at NXP, a top 10 semiconductor company founded by Philips, are enjoying the user friendly front end solution.

DoCASU is a showcase of what can be done on top of Alfresco’s Web Script approach with state of the art RIA technologies. Developers can take DoCASU as a start for even more comprehensive (or simplistic) user interfaces, purpose built front ends or just as the base for learning on how to build Alfresco user interfaces and applications leveraging Web Scripts.

It requires Alfresco 2.1.1 or later. The future DoCASU releases will include a drop zone for dragging and dropping files also for desktop interaction, tabbed navigation, configurable skins, usability improvements and more.

Read about the project and download the AMP from code.optaros.com. If you see things that need fixing, create a bug report or fix it yourself and let us know.

Forrester Research’s Stephen Powers just released their report “Web Content Management And Open Source“.

As organizations embark on next-generation Web content management (WCM) initiatives, they want to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, more costly WCM projects. As a result, information and knowledge management professionals increasingly show an interest in open source WCM as a way of controlling software costs and increasing their access to product-specific expertise in the marketplace.

Later on Powers concludes that only Alfresco and Drupal have a satisfactory product offering, proven enterprise-level implementations, and a large — and passionate — community of developers and service providers.

Animoto.com is a 2.0 style web application that creates videos out of still images with the click of a button.

You simply choose a song and images. Animoto then automatically generates a unique video for you. According to animoto, no two videos are ever the same.

Many of the post-production techniques that the founders used while working as producers for MTV, Comedy Central & ABC are used in Animoto’s patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor and director. The resulting video is produced in a widescreen format, containing the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

See the about video here or check out this video about great people at Optaros…

Jeff Potts, our ECM Practice lead was chosen Community contributor of the month.

Jeff has been a valuable contributor to the forums and the developer site wiki, and has also reported product issues in the Alfresco JIRA. However, what sets Jeff apart is the educational and insightful material he posts on his personal web site, ecmarchitect.com.

Go check out Jeff’s website. It will allow you to jump-start the learning process of Alfresco. He has lot’s of tutorials on advanced work flows, web scripts, implementing custom behaviors, working with custom content types and developing custom actions. All typical customizations with lots of links to code and supporting resources, all based on real-world examples and leveraging Jeff’s consulting experience.

Are you next to be contributor of the month (or to join Optaros to get the opportunity to)? ;)

A lot of discussions about social networks and Google open social (as usual with people who did not have a clue what they are talking about) have been going on the last couple of days. It took me a while to digest myself, but here is some content that might help.

In general, social networking services, such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, allow users to create a profile for themselves. Users can upload a picture of themselves and can often be “friends” with other users. In most social networking services, both users must confirm that they are friends before they are linked. For example, if Alice lists Bob as a friend, then Bob would have to approve Alice’s friend request before they are listed as friends. Some social networking sites have a “favorites” feature that does not need approval from the other user. Social networks usually have privacy controls that allows the user to choose who can view their profile or contact them, etc. (Wikipedia)

Today new networks are being created every day, often leveraging existing technology or white labeled offerings but still each in their own way.

And here comes the problem: when you want to be represented in multiple networks because not all of your friends are in the same site or because you have several interests mapped in different verticals. E.g. you use LinkedIn for professional reasons and have a profile on Facebook to keep in touch with contact from college and a login to MySpace because this is where you find your music. It will be a pain to maintain all of these partly definitely redundant data one by one. This is where Google comes into play and considers leveraging that pain for their own objectives (targeted advertising).

Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done including Facebook itself, potentially. … Open Social’s API is based entirely on Javascript. If you know HTML and Javascript today, you will be able to immediately use Open Social to turn your web applications and web sites into Open Social apps. You can also use standard web development tools to build Open Social apps. This is obviously a much better way to operate than having to learn a proprietary marketup language or query language. (Marc Andreessen)

So the idea is that you still build or use your own social network but then by adding open social you ensure that it becomes compatible to other networks that also incorporate it. Google open social is the glue to connecting networks. Of course in addition Google will benefit from it by having their hands on the data and the full context…

Probably the best summary is by Joanne Colan from Rocketboom (thank you Hugo for pointing me out to it).

BlogCampSwitzerland 2.0 is a European conference focusing exclusively on blogging, organized by bloggers for bloggers. It’s built upon the principles of the famous BarCamp (”ad-hoc unconference”). The next BlogCamp will again host an open environment at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), for a maximum of 200 Bloggers from all over Europe. We’re again expecting an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction between attendees. Any blogger who wants to contribute is welcome and invited to join.

This is a non-profit event: Attending is free of charge. Watch this video to understand what the BarCamp principles are about.

Planing a trip to Boston this week I came across a site with all the answers you need when web checking in for a hopefully relaxing cross Atlantic trip. Where do you get enough leg space and is 20B better that 18G? Where do I have which in-flight amenities?

It is not very Web 2.0, but just so useful. It’s my website of the month.

http://www.seatguru.com

Today we launched our EOS directory. The directory is a resource for all to use and provides a single source for the latest information on the most proven open source software for enterprise environments. It reduces the search and selection cost and time for enterprises researching open source options.

The EOS Directory bridges the gap between corporations seeking solutions through the Request for Proposal (RFP) process and the open source community which does not participate in expensive and time-consuming RFP processes. Instead, open source software organizations provide free downloads for companies to begin working on a solution. The EOS Directory fills the gap by proving expert and user ratings, case studies, forums and requests for advice for organizations to better choose the right open source software based on functionality, community backing, project trend and maturity of technology.

The EOS Directory is available at www.eosdirectory.com.

The joint Optaros-State-of-Geneva team win the Perl track of “Plat_Forms 2007”

A team built from consultants of the global Open Source and Next Generation Internet specialist Optaros and the State of Geneva won the Perl track of the international programming contest “Plat_Forms 2007”.

The programming contest “Plat_forms 2007 - The Web Development Platform Comparison” was conducted in January 2007 in Nurnberg. The contest is an integral element of research project of the “Freie Universität Berlin”. Three broadly used programming languages and environments (Perl, PHP, Java) were compared to understand how well they are suited for rapid web development. In each track three teams took the challenge to implement a comprehensive “social networking” web application in only 30 hours using Perl, PHP or Java.
“It’s really impressive, what our team achieved in only 30 hours. This clearly shows the potential that modern and open programming languages have for rapid and agile web development”, said Bruno von Rotz, Vice President for Strategy & Research at Optaros. “This contest showcased what we see happening with Web 2.0. We use Perl, but also PHP and Java in a wide range of situations and can confirm that effective high performance teams can deliver complex solutions in weeks that used to take months if not years just few years ago.”
The team, formed by two consultants of Optaros and one employee of the State of Geneva, has been able to win the Perl track. The highly efficient and closely collaborating team of Laurent Dami, Cédric Bouvier and Jean-Christophe Durand were able to find pragmatic solutions for complex problems in a short period of time and to deliver a compact and easily enhanceable result. “The flexibility of Perl and the enabled development approach helped us a lot in this exercise”, mentioned Cédric Bouvier of Optaros. “Perl is a highly attractive alternative for rapid web development, especially when combined with powerful frameworks such as Catalyst”, added Laurent Dami of State of Geneva. “Nine months ago we started building the new court management system for Geneva in Perl, in partnership with Optaros; the contest confirms that these strategic choices were the right thing to do. Once more we were able to show that Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible, as Larry Wall, the creator of Perl used to say.”

The Web Development Platform Comparison” can be found at http://www.plat-forms.org/