It’s the end of the week and although the blog posting has been minimal round these parts (but that’s ok, there’s plenty of other people blogging, to pick up the slack), we haven’t been totally asleep at the wheel, so I wanted to post notices of a few things that I’m working on, for your edification and commentary.

The first project is still very much in progress and needs some better explanation. I’m calling in the Sygn System, and the intent is to build a distributed database/”Social Networking Tool” that would specify a structured format for people to share information about themselves and their work, but more importantly provide a standardized framework for these “profiles” to be aggregated into useful collections of data to address real needs and problems.

The example posited in the document, was the problem of connecting potential users of free software and open source software with potential users of that software. Sygn would be a way to allow these people to connect in a distributed and platform/context-agnostic framework. Read the wiki page for more information.

I should, fully acknowledge the pivotal role that Carlos Perilla (or deepsapwn) has had in the formation and review of this idea. (Thanks!)

My (our?) work on this project is going to be in the direction of addressing:

• More example profiles. I created a quasi-fictitious example profile to illustrate what I saw in my mind, and to provide visual context for what a YAML-formatted profile would look like. While this is a good example, I need to generate more as an example to of what this system might be capable.

• The beginning of the document describes the entire thought process, and presents a (somewhat abstract) use case. I think at this point what we need is both the broad overview of the projects goals, which the existing text almost accomplished, and a number of more specific use cases.

• I need to firm up how the web-of-trust model would work. Full key-signing is a really high burden for a system like this (imagine if everyone you needed to verify legal names and picture ID for everyone you followed on twitter or friended on facebook?) I need to figure out if there’s a way to endorse a sub-key without signing the master key, as a way of making the burden for signing in this context less intense.

• The current document proposes deploying specific technologies in the implementation that–upon review–do not seem entirely crucial to the infrastructure of Sygn. While I think YAML (a human readable, cross-language data-serialization format.) is a great technology for this use-case, most other aspects of the implementation are secondary to the functionality, and are included in the current document as touchstones to describe functionality that I think is important. Must edit this out.

• I need to write blog posts here and for tychoish describing these use-cases and the project, both to become more clear on the subject myself and to figure out how to communicate this in additional contexts.

If you’re interested in this, feel free to contribute on the wiki, or if that’s too daunting (it should be! :) ), then feel free leave feedback in comments to this post.

The “Agile” part of the title simply refers a little mini-series of posts that I’ve posted at the end of this week on tychoish about “What it means to ‘Be Successful’ on the Internet,” and what this means in context of buzzwordy-concepts like “Community Develop” Those posts are:

• ”Levels of Success,” about community and the progression of success.

• ”Agile and Iterative Sauces,” about about the process of development, and the nature of improvement, with lessons from modern software development processes.

• ”The Collapse of Marketing,” about marketing, self-promotion, and advertising.

I think they all have, at least some appeal from a cyberculture perspective, and also insofar as, particularly the middle one, applies ideas about software development to new realms beyond software development. This sort of expansion and elaboration of technical concepts in new contexts is an incredibly exciting part of this whole “cyborg thing.”

We’ll be in touch. Thanks for reading!