This document discusses the Knowledge Hub, a proposed solution to problems around finding relevant information and people across various social and professional networks. It would use open standards and allow for third party integrations and custom apps. The Knowledge Hub could provide cost savings for local councils by hosting their intranets or providing an open source version for them to use. A beta release was planned for November with a full release by the following June through bi-weekly sprints.
3. Social and professional networks proliferate How do you find what ’s relevant? How do you make sense of all this information? How do you find who ’s relevant?
4. Knowledge Hub - Conceptual Conversations + Knowledge Sharing Personalisation & Sense Making Data, Mashups, Apps
10. Intranet/Extranet Opportunities Council Intranet Council Intranet Council Intranet Council Intranet Council Intranet Council Intranet Option1 Secure space on KHub for Local Council Intranets Option 2 Open Source version of KHub for Council Intranets/Extranets Either option can deliver significant cost savings for Councils
Moat social networks make it difficult to interchange content and conversations. Each becomes it’s own walled garden, ‘protecting’ and hiding YOUR data from other (usually proprietary) social networks.
It’s a paradox that the easer it has become to create a new website or social network (and in this context even a blog site can be considered a social network) – the more difficult it is to find and tap into the conversations that interest you.
Knowledge Hub is based on the Intelligus platform from PFIKS. It Integrates and aggregates content from many sources and uses an innovative matching engine to connect people with people and people with relevant content.
A real blog from a real person – isn ’ t this what we all want. Is this utopian, or can it be achieved now? Well, yes, 8 out of 9 is not bad for what cab be delivered for the Knowledge Hub.
Let’s take a peak under the technology hood.
Each of the major functional components is based on open-source module that has been enhanced and integrated into the PFIKS Intelligus platform. Components include Liferay CMS, Lucene search, Solr, Carot clustering, Hutch indexing, Sugar CRM. But the whole is very definitely a lot more than the sum of the parts.
Vaadin is a web application framework for Rich Internet Applications (RIA). In contrast to Javascript libraries and browser-plugin based solutions, it features a server-side architecture, which means that the largest part of the logic runs on the server. Ajax technology is used on the browser side to ensure a rich and interactive user experience. Opensocial common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications developed by Google and other social networks interoperable with any social network system that supports them KHub will have an OpenSocial ‘container’ to run apps other OpenSocial containers e.g iGoogle, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Ning. OAuth For interacting with external secure services Open protocol for secure API authorisation KHUB API For retrieval of on-platform data
Apps will change the way that we deliver some services, and offer a faster and cheaper route to market.
Intelligus/KHub offers a richer set of collaborative facilities and integration capabilities than most products in the market today, and can either replace or integrate with Enterprise 2.0 products such as Sharepoint. Two options are available – 1. To create an Internet space in the Local Government version of the platform or 2. Install the open source version in the local council hosting environment. Either options will deliver significant costs savings for councils, particularly where they are paying licence fees to major software vendors.
The full product will be delivered in a series of two-weekly development sprints (following the Scrum agile development process). The first release is scheduled for end of May 2011, which will provide community features and social media tools (wiki, blog, forum, document library, web conferencing, event diary et.). This will be followed by a series of releases delivering the data cataloguer, mashup centre and app store.
Users can join new workspaces or create their own workspace.
Activity streams will help the user to know what is going on, by whom, and where. Much the same as Facebook’s news stream.
Each workspace provides information about ownership and current activity.