Nov
18
On Wednesday November 4th, the COIN project was presented at the Internet2 fall meeting in Atlanta.
Download the powerpoint that has been presented at the “Integration of Social and Federated Identity” session.
Oct
30
Last Friday, October 29th the project team demonstrated what has been achieved during the 5th and final sprint of the COIN Project. After almost three and a half months of development we were excited to show what has been achieved. A fully functional middleware and portal could be demonstrated. Watch the video (partially in Dutch) here:
COIN Sprint October 29th
COIN Sprint October 29th (Silverlight version)
Oct
26
Exciting news from your friends at Internet2: the CoManage project, along with the Virtual Organizations LIGO and iPlant have been granted a three-year $2.65 million NFS grant to work on combining Federated Identity, Group Management and Collaboration Middleware into a toolkit that will facilitate access to distributed resources and applications by domain science projects and other virtual organizations.
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, or follower of the COIN project @SURFnet, you should by now have picked up some of the key words in the above paragraph 
Indeed the CoManage project of Internet2 and the COIN project at SURFnet are moving along very similar lines.
SURFnet and Internet2 CoManage have been ‘collaborating on collaboration’ for more than a year now, exchanging ideas on a regular basis and working towards common solutions. For the COIN project, having a peer organization operating in the same problem space to interact with has been of tremendous value. We even share technologies in some cases. For example, SURFnets SURFteams service, which allows using group relations over multiple domains and applications, was build on top of the Grouper, which is also what CoManage is using.
Also both projects depend heavily on what we call ‘domesticated’ applications, that is, applications and services that allow a user to login using the account of his/her home institution and use an externalized group service for group management. While both projects are working on their own applications, we found there is much commonality in the requirements of our communities. We therefor try to make sure that the solutions we adapt are based on open, standards based interfaces, so these are usable by both projects. We are also jointly working on a set of wiki pages, the ‘Domestication Wiki‘ – note, this is work in progress – that provide information on applications and services that can be used with our platforms. If you feel you have applications or services that should be added to that wiki, by all means drop me an email!
Congratulations CoManage, I am looking forward to our continued collaboration!
Oct
20
Written by Marielle Schipper in category: OpenSocial, ProjectCOIN
On Monday, December 6 and Tuesdag, December 7, SURFnet and the OpenSocial Foundation organize the OpenSocial Europe Summit and the OpenSocial Industry Spotlight on Education event in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It’s a free event. To registrate for this event:
http://event.surfnet.nl/first_european_opensocial_event_in_utrecht_the_netherlands_6_and_7_december_2010.html
Oct
13
Written by Marielle Schipper in category: OpenSocial, ProjectCOIN
The OpenSocial Foundation and SURFnet are excited to announce the OpenSocial Europe Summit and OpenSocial in Education Industry Spotlight event, to be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on Monday, Dec. 6 and Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2010.
The event will focus on the use of the OpenSocial, its technologies and implementations, and will have a special concentration on the use of OpenSocial in Research and Education. This two day event is the first OpenSocial Summit held in Europe, and the first to include an industry specific spotlight.
Day one will feature prominent speakers from the OpenSocial community who will present and demonstrate the nuts and bolts of the specification, including what’s new in version 1.1, best practices for building social applications, and the emerging use of OpenSocial within the Enterprise. There will also be technical sessions on understanding Apache Shindig, the open source reference framework for OpenSocial. The first day will conclude with a broad outline of where the community is heading with future releases and a call to action to get involved.
The second day is dedicated to the use of OpenSocial in Research and Education. This will consist of both interactive workshops and presentations. Several industry experts from the Research and Educational sector will discuss their experiences using OpenSocial in their solutions. For example, SURFnet will present its project on implementing a new Collaboration Infrastructure and will demonstrate how OpenSocial plays an important role in this infrastructure by it enabling group centric collaboration in an open, platform independent way.
More information about the agenda:
http://wiki.opensocial.org
Blog of the OpenSocial Foundation:
http://blog.opensocial.org
More information about the OpenSocial Foundation:
http://www.opensocial.org
Oct
10
Last Friday, October 8th the project team demonstrated what has been achieved during the 4th sprint of the COIN Project. The demo started with a short presentation on the outline and goals of the project. Watch the video here:
COIN Sprint October 8th Intro + Demo
COIN Sprint October 8th – Demo Only – (Silverlight version)
Oct
07
Modern universities are developing towards loose conglomerates of (inter)discipline expertise that has a high degree of connectedness with society in the broader sense. 21st century universities may also be regarded as ‘knowledge servers’ in which a number of communities create, share, publish and apply knowledge. Learning and research, in other words, is becoming a community-wide activity. In order to support the formation and development of academic communities, the University of Amsterdam has tailored the community (open) source collaboration and learning platform Sakai (http://www.sakaiproject.org) and created an integrated community system that meets basic requirements for community support, UvA Communities
UvA Communities aims to place this important observation in the context of the 21st century University, by creating a ubiquitous community platform that is able to stage a number of different communities and users, including individuals from outside university. Within one system, users can become a member of one or more communities, and communities may be formed around a number of topics, ranging from a general field of studies or research to an ad hoc problem area or course sites for an innovative educational setting
The context and principal aim of the COIN & UvA Communities use case is to provide a collaboration service that users from multiple organizations are able to use. It’s very purpose is to allow people from outside the university organization to connect within the realm of the university and to give insiders means to easily connect outside university, all having access to the same set of tools and services, which are extensible with tailor-made functionality. People from many different cultural and scientific backgrounds collaborate on a variety of topics and take on multiple roles in multiple communities.
Its relationship with COIN is obvious. The COIN infrastructure provides the perfect layer to facilitate user access and multiple ad hoc group relationships for users from multiple organizations to work, learn and share in a true collaboration spirit using the UvA Communities (Sakai) platform. The COIN infrastructure provides also a platform to interconnect UvA Communities functionalities as widget or gadget services in other platforms based on the OpenSocial adoption & implementation in COIN.
An important partner for the University of Amsterdam is Edia (http://www.edia.nl). This Amsterdam based company has in depth knowledge of the Sakai platform. The tools needed to integrate COIN and UvA Communities (Sakai) will be built by Edia in cooperation with the UvA and SURFnet. Our goal is a working integration by the end of this year.
Oct
06
One of the core requirements for online collaboration via COIN is the availability of collaboration services. Luckily, the market offers a wide (and rapidly growing) range of online applications. The COIN project aims at including as many of those 3rd party applications in the app- and gadget store as possible. Therefore, we are in a continuous search of applications with SAML and OpenSocial support (two important conditions for inclusion) to be provided via COIN.
One of these products is Liferay Social Office. Liferay Social Office is a collaboration suite with functionality like document sharing, calendaring, workflows and, very important for the COIN project, it has the ability to build gadgets. In a partnership with Proteon, a Dutch Liferay hosting partner, we are now adapting Liferay Social Office to make it a perfect match for the collaboration infrastructure. So far, Proteon has been able to adapt and configure Liferay Social Office to support federative access and to provide OpenSocial gadgets. This week some final steps will be made to externalize group relations. In practice, this means that Liferay will be able to consume group relationships from external group management tools (e.g. SURFteams). With this achievement, we will have the first fully “domesticated” application at hand. Thumbs up !
In a next post we will report on a similar initiative: the domestication of Alfresco by Igi Group.
Please let us know if you have any suggestions for online applications that would fit in the COIN project (add a comment)
Oct
02
Written by Niels van Dijk in category: OpenSocial, SCRUM
Last week, the Apache Shindig team released the 2.0.0 version of their OpenSocial container. Shindig is the OpenSocial reference implementation by the Apache Foundation. This new version marks a mayor upgrade from the previous 1.01 version, and most notably implements most of the the OpenSocial 1.0 specification.
The COIN project team was keen on adapting this new version rapidly, as Shindig is one of the major building blocks for the COIN platform. Interesting for us are, among others, solid group support, and the new javascript osapi. It look like this new release is a very good basis to roll out our platform near the end of this year.
Getting it into sync with our own branch was, however, not so easy. We faced a whopping 25 major conflicts, which kept Okke and Christiaan occupied for the better part of 2 days. Not all conflicts were bad news however: some were actually fixes for issues we had previously created a workaround for, so moving to 2.0.0 was actually an improvement. And a big thanks to the Shindig community for helping us out on several of the issues we encountered!
With our OpenSocial codebase now fully in sync with the 2.0.0 release, the engine block really geared up, and only a few minor bugs to be taken care of I am looking forward to the upcoming sprint demo (Okt 8 ) where we will be able to show some major steps forward!
Sep
24
Many people have asked us to provide a preview of the reference portal we are building. Below you will find an number of pictures with the visual designs. (click and again click to zoom)
