Open Action Network December 5, 2010
Information below is from the website. I look forward to checking it out and discovering its relevance for Dadamac and our friends
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Open Action Network is an open source, nonprofit technology initiative to enable decentralized sharing of actions and discussions across networks of websites. At the heart of the Open Action Network are the Open Action Protocols that specify standard formats for publishing, discovering, subscribing, discussing, and sharing activity around action feeds. Learn more.
Like most innovations, necessity mothered the creation of the Open Action Network.
In 2009, we ran into an all-too-common problem while trying to sync upcoming events like house parties and workshops across affiliated websites. How do we efficiently deduplicate, broadcast, and track data if it’s flowing in several directions within a network?
Rather than reinventing the wheel with a new action-oriented content management system, we approached the open source community with a list of problems we are trying to solve…
- How to enable pushing of updates so websites don’t need to constantly poll each other?
- How to deduplicate similar postings if they refer to the same event?
- What are the best practices for displaying data from different websites?
- What are the best open source projects for maps, calendars, and other interfaces?
- How to sync comments across websites?
- What do to with comments SPAM?
- How to integrate with existing CMS’s (content management systems)?
- How to report views and other metrics back to the originating website?
Fortunately, many of these problems were already being solved. We just needed a way to bundle the different solutions together into a workable system.
In early 2010, Open Action Network was born as an open source collaboration between nonprofit campaign networks and web developers from the Identity Commons community.
Although Open Action Network is not strictly limited in scope to nonprofits, the nonprofit networks have an urgent and real-world need that is driving the development road map.
Using emerging standards like OAuth, PubSubHubBub, and Salmon Protocol, Open Action Network streamlines the sharing of actions, comments, and metrics across affiliated websites while providing best practices, source code, and off-the-shelf functionality within popular CMS’s.
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Posted to Dadamac's Posterous by Pamela McLean
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Email - pamela.mclean@dadamac.net
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