Dreadmwidth/Livejournal Collaboration for ARCS v0.1, May 11, 2009

1. What is this?

A proposal to use the free and open source technologies used by Livejournal (livejournal.com) and further developed by Dreamwidth (dreamwidth.org) to create an effective social collaboration and journaling site for Australian researchers.

2. Background

Livejournal is a open social networking site with almost 20 million individual journals plus communities. It was started by a high school student Brad Fitzpatrick in April 1999, sold to Six Apart in 2005 and then to the Russian media company SUP in 2007.

Each journal (individual or community) has its own web page, which includes the comments left by other users in threaded discussions, which is typical for various journaling or 'blogging services and an email-like service for private messages. However, in addition, each user has a journal page, which shows all their recent journal entries. The most distinctive feature of the LiveJournal technology is an aggregated "reading list" which encourages a high level of social interaction between the individual journal and those other journals (individual and community) that they have subscribed to.

Unlike other social networking services (e.g., Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter) the Livejournal service is particularly well suited for collaborative research. The capacity of strong journaling technologies (at least equivalent to WordPress) combined with the aggregation of other journals is not found elsewhere, least of all as a free and open-source product. Good journaling technologies (Wordpress, Blogger, Vox) by themselves tend to be disaggregated, requiring visits to different websites which may use entirely different journaling software. In contrast the social networking services, although providing a single service and good social networking features, typically have very poor journaling tools, which typically reflects in the trivial content that such sites attract.

3. Vision

Individual Australian researchers (only) would be able to create an account at arcsjournal.org.au in the format of firstname-surname (i.e., without pseudonyms) [1] and only for academic purposes. They would be able to select for their reading list other collaborators. All posts can be public or private (to subscribers only).

Collaboration teams would be able to make use of the 'communities' tool. These would require a team leader or leaders who would have the task of moderation of members and posts etc, as deemed necessary (e.g., it could have membership open to all researchers and unmoderated posting). Some collaboration teams could even include a process of peer review (e.g., a number of moderators who screen a proposed post prior to publication).

4. Implementation

Dreamwidth/Livejournal is written in Perl with the source code available on a Mecurial repository (http://hg.dwscoalition.org/). Brad Fitzpatrick has given a talk on the technology behind Livejournal; it's a little old, but does give some idea of its ability to scale [2]

[1] The reasons are well known, see http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/c/c9/Theory.jpg (apologies for the language, but it is accurate!).
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/SergeyChernyshev/behind-the-scenes-at-livejour...