Become an OpenSocial Board Member! Nominations are open!

As President of OpenSocial, I’m pleased to announce that the nominations for the Community Elected Board seat are now Open! The nomination period will run from December 6, 2010 through Jan 9, 2011, when voting will commence.

Anyone OpenSocial member is able to serve on the board. The only requirement to nominate or hold the position is that you must be a member of the OpenSocial Foundation. There are no membership fees to join OpenSocial. All you need to do is fill out a simple on-line membership application.

Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

OpenSocial 1.1 Published!

The OpenSocial Foundation is pleased to announce the community has approved the publication of version 1.1 of the specification.

In addition to general clarifications, this release now defines the API that enable gadgets to communicate with each other via a pub/sub mechanism. In addition to the API, the specification also defines metadata that an application can include that specifies the events it is able to publish and subscribe. This enables OpenSocial providers to leverage this metadata in tools and advanced container capability.

Using this new API and metadata, developers of OpenSocial applications (gadgets), can create highly interactive mashups where components are not just assembled on the glass, but integrated with each other. This capability is especially important in enterprise settings where OpenSocial is being increasingly utilized as key Internet technology.

Congratulations to the community on another great release!

Published by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

OpenSocial Meetup in RTP, North Carolina

The first Enterprise OpenSocial interop was last week with a number of participants testing container and gadget interoperability. One of the things we took away from the conversation was the need to reach out and engage a broader audience, including application developers who may not be as focused on Apache Shindig or the OpenSocial specification work.

In order to promote the standards work and share new features that are coming soon, a number of OpenSocial members have pulled together in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, to host our first OpenSocial RTP Meetup on November 30, 2010. Here are a few ideas to get the conversation going for the first meeting:

  • An introduction to OpenSocial
  • Getting started with Apache Shindig
  • ActivityStreams integration with OpenSocial
  • How to use the new Pub/Sub feature in OpenSocial 1.1

This is a B.Y.O.G event!! (Bring Your Own Gadgets) — We’ll try to do a test/interop session. This will be an informal gathering and we’re open to topics, interests and questions, so please jump in and update the wiki page with your ideas. Please be sure to RSVP for the event so that we can get an accurate count.

Note: Because of spammers, we’ve had to turn off open registration to the OpenSocial wiki. If you need an ID, simply e-mail the coordinators or post a request on the OpenSocial Community group.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted on behalf of Andy Smith (IBM), by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation