Dissemination Concept
From FutureInternetWiki
Draft, version 0.4, by Lyndon Nixon and Jacek Kopecky.
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[edit] Future Internet Projects Dissemination Concept
Effective dissemination may be achieved when it is not limited to the individual projects, organisations or individuals in the Future Internet but also that there is an overarching effort at the level of the Future Internet itself to disseminate news and results via Web 2.0 channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.
Future Internet incorporates over 150 projects and hence several hundred organisations and a few thousand participants. How to capture from each of these sources the Future Internet relevant news, to more effectively disseminate it via combined channels such as the websites of the Future Internet Support Actions (FISAs), or the Future Internet portal itself?
Through the use of structured publication of this news and results from the individual sources, proposed here through the use of an activity stream model such as RSS combined with agreed tags, we can implement a more effective process of collection and re-dissemination of significant Future Internet news and results.
The steps to achieve this more efficient process would be:
- collection of structured activity streams from each relevant provider. While any data model could be supported that is structured and parseable (e.g. XML based), we focus on two of the most common: RSS/Atom (below, we write simply RSS) and Twitter. All website CMS or blogs support RSS or Atom output. Furthermore extensions/modules are available to tweet new items.
- categorization of activity stream content as Future-Internet-relevant and in which aspect(s). In RSS, this can be done via the <category> element, however this is often not used in RSS streams so the alternative is to use the keywords within the item <title>. In Twitter, this is achieved by hashtags (#name) included within the tweet, while the Twitter Annotation API may allow later that tweets may be categorised by an 'external' method. See below for details on the categories.
- aggregation of the news items. Different aggregators may be active to collect news items about Future Internet or some part of it (by domain or activity). For example, SOFI as the support action in Internet of Services will focus on news from the services domain. Based on the news item categorization, news from the different sources can be brought toward and redistributed along other, specific channels.
[edit] Category Tags
The top level category is Future Internet, which indicates that the news item is relevant to the EU FI activity in any domain or activity:
- RSS category: finternet
- RSS item title text: Future Internet
- Twitter hashtag: #finternet
All other categories are interpreted in the context of the item being relevant to Future Internet — i.e. the above categorization should always be present, this also disambiguates the remaining categories meaning in the context of the news item. The item may be categorized by the FI domain it relates to — while the source itself may be indicative of this, e.g. a networked media project can be assumed to disseminate news about the networked media domain.
Domains: Internet of Services, Future Networks, Networked Media, Internet of Things, Trust & Security, Testbeds
- RSS category: ios, network, media, iot, trustandsecurity, fire
- RSS item title text: Internet of Services, Future Networks, Networked Media, Internet of Things, Trust & Security, Testbeds
- Twitter hashtag: #ios, #network, #media, #iot, #trustandsecurity, #fire
The item should be categorized, when relevant, to the FI activity it relates to
Activities: FIA, FIA Book, FI Portal, FI Architecture, FI Standardisation (or Standardization), FI International Collaboration, FI Roadmapping
- RSS category: fia, fiabook, fiportal, fiarch, fistandard, ficollab, firoadmap
- RSS item title text: Future Internet Assembly, FIA Book or Future Internet Book, FI Portal or Future Internet Portal, FI Architecture or Future Internet Architecture, FI Standardisation or Future Internet Standardisation (or Standardization), FI International Collaboration or Future Internet Collaboration, FI Roadmapping or Future Internet Roadmapping
- Twitter hashtag: #fia, #fiabook, #fiportal, #fiarch, #fistandard, #ficollab, #firoadmap
- or with #finternet: #book #portal #architecture #standards #collaboration #roadmap
Finally, other categories/hashtags may emerge around shared topics, and should be communicated to the appropriate news aggegrators. For example, while a project does not need to reference itself in its own news stream, an organisation publishing a news item may include the relevant project as a category/hashtag.
[edit] Examples
(a) example with RSS category
<category domain="http://www.future-internet.eu">finternet</category>
(b) example with Dublin Core subject (in lieu of RSS category)
<dc:subject>finternet</dc:subject>
(c) example with Atom category
<atom:category scheme="http://www.future-internet.eu" term="finternet" label="Future Internet"/>
(d) example with RSS item title
<title>Example news item about input to FI Standardisation for the Future Internet of Services </title>
-> categories Future Internet, Internet of Services, FI Standardisation
(e) Twitter
At #fia #poznan we are announcing new idea for #finternet #standards activity
[edit] Usage within SOFI
SOFI will demonstrate the advantages of this approach for the projects and other news providers within their community of services and cloud projects. SOFI will catch all news items published with the Future Internet (finternet) category from its known sources (RSS and Twitter feeds) and republish them on the Future Internet portal www.future-internet.eu with the possibility to filter by source or activity.
Also, a manual moderation phase will monitor the items being captured and select key items for a more detailed dissemination: invited publication on the SOFI blog or provision of results on the FI portal, submission of the news to dedicated newsletters (SOFI, or cross-domain FIA), promotion in the Future Internet portal news page, and further opportunities additionally to be explored (e.g. to the FI-PPP, etc.)
For support on implementing this process in your RSS or Twitter feed, or with comments, suggestions or criticism to this proposal, please contact Lyndon Nixon lyndon.nixon@sti2.org and Jacek Kopecky j.kopecky@open.ac.uk
[edit] Explanations
- Activity stream
- while even a formal model for an activity stream exists (activitystrea.ms) here we refer to any structured publication of distinct items over time at a certain place, e.g. blog posts, Facebook status updates, Twitter tweets. Generally, an activity stream will always consist of one or more items, each of which being associated with a timestamp.
- News item
- an "item" in our context can actually be any sort of content update made into the activity stream. We call these items "news items" due to the context of disseminating these items meaning that they should represent in some general sense "news" about what the publisher is doing, has done etc. However, a news story, or blog post, is only one type of possible news item. We consider equally valid the addition of a document into the stream, media (image, video, audio), link to software, demonstrator etc. However to be useful outside of its original context, such news items will require minimally some explanatory text to introduce what the content represents, how it can be used, etc.
