mondora spa » enterprise 2.0

Data protection on Social Network

dborellini — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:34:38 +0000

L’attenzione di mondora spa all’etica ed alla persona, unita all’esperienza nello sviluppo e nel mashup di Social Community, ci ha dato lo spunto per l’avvio della ricerca per l’esplorazione della privacy delle informazioni e la concezione di un sistema di privatizzazione dei dati e dei contenuti che ogni utente pubblica all’interno delle Social Community.

Da un’attenta analisi dei Terms of service di alcune delle maggiori Social Community, in mondora spa è nata l’esigenza di rivolgersi alle persone per agevolare la tutela della loro privacy.

Alcuni Social Network si sono ora arrogati la proprietà dei contenuti che l’utente pubblica o collega al loro interno, ma non solo fintantoché l’utente è registrato alla community, bensì anche oltre il momento in cui l’utente decide di chiudere l’account. Allo stesso modo viene conservata copia di qualsiasi contenuto o informazione pubblicati dall’utente anche successivamente alla loro rimozione.
Inoltre, i dati in questione possono essere sublicenziati ed utilizzati a fini commerciali senza la necessità di dover fare richiesta o notifica alcuna all’utente stesso.

Il nostro impegno è di indentificare un sistema di criptaggio light dei dati e dei contenuti che si pone come un filtro a qualsiasi informazione per evitare utilizzi impropri di esse, anche se l’utente -creando un account- ha accettato le condizioni imposte dai Terms Of Service.
In questo modo tutte le informazioni dell’utente pubblicate sui Social Network vengono rese pubbliche all’intero parco utenti o limitatamente alla propria friendlist ed alla piattaforma in sé, ma soltanto fino a quando l’utente stesso decide che l’informazione sia visibile. Dal momento che l’utente rimuove le autorizzazioni o cancella il suo account nel database dei Social Network l’informazione rimarrà inutilizzabile in quanto cifrata.

Vengono così rovesciate le gerarchie secondo le quali l’utente è obbligato a sottoscrivere il Terms of service che gli viene presentato per poter utilizzare qualsiasi Social Network.
L’utente accetta sì le condizioni imposte dal Social Network, ma contemporaneamente crea una sorta di proprio Terms Of Service attraverso il quale ha la facoltà di decidere quali informazioni ed a chi renderle disponibili e soprattutto di limitarne l’accesso alla piattaforma in sé anche nel momento in cui le informazioni sono rese pubbliche.

Non diventa più un miraggio la possibilità di integrazione dei sistemi informativi aziendali o pubblici, come quello bancario o sanitario, all’interno dei Social Network, dove l’utente potrà ricevere direttamente le informazioni di sua necessità, come l’estratto conto o il referto di una visita medica, senza che esse diventino di pubblico dominio o utilizzabili a fini statistici e/o commerciali.

Integrazione di Applicazioni Enterprise con Facebook

Francesco Mondora — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 08:11:27 +0000

Facebook come tante altre social networks sono delle reti ad alto potenziale dalle quali è possibile trarre dei vantaggi raggiungendo una massa di utenti enorme.

L’esperienza di mondora spa nello sviluppo di applicazioni Social Oriented e nella System Integration “classica” ci permette di proporre al mercato la possibilità di integrare i propri sistemi informativi con le Social Community mantenendo sempre chiari, visibili i canoni di qualità, sicurezza e privacy dell’informazione.

Il servizio offerto da Facebook è uno strumento di comunicazione sul quale poter offrire i propri servizi Enterprise a tutti gli utenti che lo utilizzano. Per questo mondora spa nella soluzione di integrazione ha approcciato diversi scenari di integrazione.

EMAAS – Enterprise Mashup as a Service

La risultante dell’integrazione tra una applicazione e una Social Application, quale Facebook, risulta nello sviluppare un mashup frutto del confluire di dati da una applicazion e dall’altra. L’erogazione del Mashup permette di offrire dei servizi ad un utente della propria Applicazione Enterprise e al suo profilo all’interno della community permettondogli di poter trarre benefici personali in un singolo ambito (la community o l’Applicazione Enterprise).

Social Network Integration

Data la sua natura l’implementazione del Mashup, rispetto alla normale attività di System Integration, necessita di una ulteriore analisi e dello studio dell’Interazione fra l’utente ed il sistema. Tale attività, che comunemente è chiamata Interaction Design, ha l’obiettivo di porre l’utente al centro dell’applicazione e modellare le funzionalità rispetto al modo con il quale l’utente vive e lavora all’interno della Social Community.

L’integrazione delle applicazioni avviene in rispetto dei canoni di sicurezza già appartenenti all’applicazione proprietaria e richiederà che l’Azienda ospiti vicino all’applicazione proprietaria anche la componente logica di integrazione che poi sarà data in uso attraverso Facebook o altre Social Community; il dato del profilo utente è arricchito con le informazioni legate alla community sulla base di dati accessibile dal mashup dove sono visibili solo gli identificativi dell’utente. Le informazioni legate al profilo utente o al servizio sono ottenute direttamente dalla infrastruttura esistente attraverso delle API che sono esposte dalla applicazione; tali API possono essere esposte in diversi modi e possono essere transazionali se l’applicazione lo richiede.

Frutto dell’integrazione è l’esposizione della propria Applicazione Enterprise nel modello As A Service dove è documentata l’API di integrazione con la quale diverse evoluzioni potranno emergere.

Flusso di Integrazione

L’informazione che l’utente si è sottoscritto al Mashup avviene in maniera Virale: tutti gli utenti amici dell’utente che utilizza l’applicazione sono informati che l’utente ha scelto di utilizzare un servizio piuttosto che un altro. In questo modo gli utenti dell’applicazione possono utilizzare servizi applicativi direttamente dalla social community e utenti della social community possono sottoscrivere i servizi direttamente dalla community.

L’integrazione con una o più Social Community introduce un nuovo canale di comunicazione con gli utenti permettendo di ricevere le comunicazioni, che una volta erano mandate via posta elettronica, attraverso la Community nella quale l’utente si sente rappresentato.mondora spa, ha l’impressione che le tecnologie che sono emerse nel mondo dell’opensource e dalla cultura “community-driven” siano ora ben posizionate per connettere sistemi software aziendali con dipendenti, partners e clienti. L’evoluzione della Software Integration verso orizzonti aperti (opensource e cultura community-driven) permette di differenziare i propri servizi passando dal concetto di servizi stand-alone a una offerta di servizi distribuibili dove un grande numero di utenti utilizza e promuove l’appliczione.

Some 2.0 anti patterns in Development As A Service

Francesco Mondora — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:58:00 +0000

The main intent of the Software Development As A Service, is to outsource development to stay better focused on what is really producing value in the starting 2.0 pioneer’s company.
A fresh and new idea is the real trouble of a Startup and most of the energy should be spent on that direction, while other problems are addressed trusting the services bought depending on the Service Level Agreement defined.

After a good experience in the 2.0 era in developing several online communities from the Service Provider point of view, I think it’s time to share what I’m learning and the mistakes I’m doing in facing this kind of opportunities.

I’m calling those experience anti patterns because they are a good representation of what can be optimal in theory and is really ineffective in practice if the 1.0 culture is mixed with the 2.0 culture.

Embrace Software Development Company processes

Having the idea to implement all the software by delegating to a Development Provider, comprises the adoption of all IT culture of the engaged service provider.

This can be obvious a really proficient until the Startup Company is trying to figure its own development process asking the service provider to embrace and focus on its way of doing things.

This approach drives to two main drawbacks:

1. Startup company is now focusing ideas to development process that is not really creating revenue for its business;
2. Software development company is forced to change the way they do things, learning a new option in software development and focusing on the customer’s process intention instead of customer business needs.

This moves the Startup’s focus from the Business idea to development spending energy (and money) in thinking on gates instead of thinking on the time to market for even easier idea and Software development to produce process’s artifacts (reports, well-formatted documents, etc.) instead of good software.

Focus cannot be easily restored because the current focus is to be compliant with the process. When choosing a Software Provider Company, a 2.0 startup should put in its decision table.
The way the provider works is a good point of evaluation and must be agreed with the Startup Company to avoid the process as the next collaboration’s problem.

Identify a Service Level Agreement on each Service

Startup and Service providers should agree on both parties on how they’re allocating or delivering services request.
A Startup Company should create milestones that bases the professional relation. Milestones are business objectives that potentially influences the ROI of the Startup Company, and Servicing company should base their SLA depending on the milestones objective.

A SLA identifies an interaction model where parties agrees to implement something that is really valuable; this creates a conversational and honest model where things go in the same direction and both.
The parties are focused on the goal. Without a SLA, a Startup Company is shifting to an investment protection system paradigm where energy are spent to avoid money loss. Without a SLA, a Service Provider focuses on service’s accountability instead of service providing.
The more the Service Level is the more is the price for it. This simple rule can be extended in: the more on the service level of what is really indispensable the more a company can pay for it.

Easiness is not simpleness

A 2.0 application is a big mash up of Services around the network; in the 1.0 culture there is the idea of System Integrator that is responsible solely to do a kind of component integration.
Meanwhile in the 2.0 culture the idea of system integrator is hidden by the idea that services are available on standard protocol and then easy to integrate because it’s just a javascript call or a bunch of ruby on rails lines.

The complexity of integration in 2.0 is the same of the 1.0, every integrated platform must be reliable, must work and have custom development associated. The big difference from 2.0 and 1.0 is that 2.0 integration is through services starting from the presentation tier, while in the 1.0 everything is hidden in the integration tier.

A 2.0 approach is to make the user interaction easier by leveraging on all the available technology: that’s really complex and require great skill and good professionalism.

Re-DO to DO approach: talk and listen together

2.0 culture is pioneering, and fresh ideas are often not clear to be written as a strict requisite. It’s easy to misunderstand what the customer is explaining and what the Service Provider is understanding.
Small iterations and a continuous conversational approach must be established to achieve the same goal. Customer and Service Provider have to thing that the counterparts are producing value day by day discovering things that are still unknown.

A 1.0 approach drives the customer to outline all the requirements predicting what will be, and in the most cases failing in some aspects. Failing means: redo the same thing. Consequences of the “redoing mindset” will be unable to launch the Startup’s Services at each milestone. Redoing several times, breaks trustiness and team happiness.

A 2.0 approach is based on continuous improvement on things and from the failing paradigm moves to the Learning paradigm. Continuous improvement switch the mindset from stable services to perpetual beta services.

Conclusions

These are some of the things I’ve found from a first retrospective with all the involved players in my experience from the Provider Company. I’m sure this is only a starting point for the 2.0 anti pattern catalog and more will come from the experience.

Twitter is not a new form of Journalism!

Francesco Mondora — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:27:00 +0000

Microblogging generally can be seen as a new way of exchanging information between user, but what happen where all the microbloggers share a topic during a public event and talk about it. News propagation is more viral that people can think, and I’ve had a demonstration, directly and live in Varese at Università dell’Insubria during the Enterprise 2.0 forum.

This is what happened to me last Wednesday in Varese at the Enterprise 2.0 forum. There were lot of people and an internet connection. Some of them I’ve already followed on twitter because they twits some good micro news I really appreciate. I know Luis Suarez and follow him on twitter since a month; Luis was one of the speaker at the conference. Since the first moment at the conference me and Mike started twitting in an “informal” way our status at the conference. Twitting it realizes that all our followers knewn what’s going on. Luis saw it and agreed with us it was nice to track the entire conference on twitter. We agreed on a tag (unique maybe) to tag the conference and we decided #e20forum. Well the word has spread and all the Luis follower, Mike follower, and mine follower have known we were ready and already negotiated how to track the conference. Some of them were in the room and some of them were on the speaker’s table.
Well, a new pool of journalist has been configured without paying without asking to do that job.
During every speech on this underlying channel, everyone has published all the information considered important and the cloud of news magically appear with many really insightful information. Someone has twitted some real time pics, other their slides about the topic they covered. It’s amazing to see how the day time line was well documented in a collaborative fashion, without organization, and with the participation of the speaker and the public without knowing before. It’s amazing to think about old style journalist. Some of them sat near me that were putting words on block notes and now are reordering their ideas and how I can go to a Summize – a Twitter Mash up – and know what happened and know what is still happening around it.

This experience was the most important experience to me that significantly defines how the world is changing, how people shall be connected each other and which is the path of the communication.

All the speeches were really good and what happened under the hood was really in a 2.0 fashion making a new culture tangible. I would like to thanks all the twitters and twitpicsers for the moment they gave to the Enterprise 2.0 forum, and I think this is a real Success Case of a new form of Journalism.

Last mine consideration is that twitter and summize are only tool, and the new form of journalist is the way we collaborate with all the people related to us. It is insightful to see how people in my network, perceived the conference emphasizing some topic I didn’t see, and how I realized better what was going on from a collaborative culture.

Have Agile and Enterprise 2.0 something in common?

Francesco Mondora — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:34:00 +0000

Nowadays companies are thinking to promote a social graph inside the corporate instead of hierarchies. This is common to agile practice where all the developers together are the project manager.

Agile Manifesto and 2.0 approach have something that sounds really similar: people. People are the key in both Agile and in Enterprise 2.0.
Agile Manifesto outlines how project will be managed in a more conversational way, where values are the driver in software development. An enterprise 2.0 is focusing on people too, where a company’s seen as a multitude of people that are working together, having a relationship that helps the system growing.

Currently companies are focusing on process and tools over comprehensive documentation. Currently companies are following a plan that enables negotiation between Customer and Provider.

Agile shall make companies focusing on individuals and interactions. Agile focuses on working software that is responding to changes. Agile establishes Customer as a Partner through collaboration.

The enterprise 2.0 shall make companies focusing on relations between individuals and interaction over essential documentation and a fully functional company. The Enterprise 2.0 is responding to change and establishes Customer as a partner and colleague as a Friend.
Enterprise 2.0 focuses on adopting similar values expressed by the Agile Manifesto to corporate where the delivery is the corporate itself and not only software. Corporate, like Agile management techniques, trusts on human ability to create and maintain hi-value relations.

Both of the two mentioned approaches create a more conversational environment where colleagues/developers/partners can share their opinion their problem each other. Informal relations are brought forward to formal relation, where the main opportunity is to evolve something together.

Developer 2.0 – Tagging for developers

Francesco Mondora — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:18:00 +0000

Developers are building sophisticated tagging system, clouds and drill down mechanism to explore them that project their service in a 2.0 scenario.

Tagging is implemented because it gives lots of benefit in managing and finding contents. Developers should gain this benefits directly from the technology they implement while developing an application.

For example consider if you’re writing an application module that consist of:

a web page
a javascript file
a controller object

Tagging them with a tag like module: bookmarklet a developer can consistently declare a unit of development and group logical information together.
Tagging evolves an architect by letting a user to perceive an application in several form. If two files are tagged with an architectural block like the previous block, an extra information can be derived: those two components have a relationship and this relationship should be preserved.

Evolution of a tag cloud

Tag clouds are an impressive way to show which is the major taxonomy on a given content. In my Developer 2.0 idea, tag cloud could be a starting point to get information about how software is implemented and the ranking of each tag is derived, as in the common way, from the tagged contents (sources, documents, etc.).
Filtering tags on a tag cloud gave having a specific namespace, should catch immediately which is the most complex behavior of the system in terms of number of artifacts in it.
In a tag cloud like this, tag names should be arranged by thinking the idea that a content is a neighbor to another content if they share the same tag. All those two content have different tags on and depending on their neighborhood they are showed near by on the tag cloud.

Imagine if you like to browse a tag cloud filtering for namespace: architecture:

Cloud is composed of:

architecture:payment

architecture:messaging

etc.

If a specified payment component notifies troughs the messaging platform a transaction completion, it is tagged by the developer both as “architecture: payment” and “architecture: messaging.” Those two tags are now neighbors and in a tag cloud they will be showed, or better linked with their specific size.

This is a new, modern way to have a diagram of how an architecture evolves and the tag cloud can be computed over time and this is a great opportunity a tagging system in the developer 2.0 environment introduces.

I’ll continue in the next posts, about how tagging can help me – as a developer – in doing better.

Developer 2.0 – from Code to Content

Francesco Mondora — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:34:00 +0000

Nowadays, development and tools are focusing on better IDE that brings best to developers are not giving a new sense of what development could be.
Developing as a business, having an industrial approach, requires to build software considering quality with the best language of the world and documenting all for all the steps requiring while delivering software that satisfies a particular business.

Speaking with modern programmers, I can feel them like to write code in a more expressive and natural language so they don’t need to write external documentation and this helps. Other developers to better understand the code while reading it.
Developers don’t like writing documentation for two reasons:

1. documentation is hardly maintainable when code evolves and, maybe, there is not time to maintain it;
2. documentation is not a compiled artifact and developers don’t see it for production purposes

I see developers that want to discuss about their code on blogs where they show the techniques around their algorithms, or I see developers that are sending code snippets to other developers by email, asking them to refactor that class in that code portion.

Code is the central point in doing development, and for programmers it’s a content they continuously produce over time, share and exchange with others.

Nowadays on the web 2.0 era, development is talking about how to address 2.0 issues for some business case and is not addressing development as a community work where code is a content produced by the community.

Thinking about code as a content, developers when producing it should

publish comments on it;
blog and reblog it;
tag it with some more development oriented tags;
bookmark it.

Like every community Developer 2.0 community should have an online space where to live and where to publish its content (code). Code should be edited on line and for each code snippet (method, class, blocks) a developer should add comments (like she does), should blog it, should tag it, or should bookmark it.

Code editing and browsing
Working, sometime as a developer, I usually develop with an open page to a wiki page where I write stuff about architecture, about why I chose to implement those lines of codes in such way etc, and I work with the Text Editor to edit my lines of codes. Every time, I would like to a wiki page to the developed code, I enclose the wiki’s code link inside the code for future better understands. When finished I commit on the version control and I move on the next feature.
Thinking about an evolution if the code is recognized as a content, it will be managed like the text I write on the wiki and wiki will be managed as comment in the code. A development platform for 2.0 should let a developer to work on a workspace where code is edited online in a 2.0 fashion: like a blogger does while blogging. Browsing would be the same, you browse the code space and while browsing you can see all is around code.

Code commenting
Traditional code commenting is done using commenting statement offered by languages, and comments are written in a sparse way depending on the purpose. They are written near the code, on wiki pages, on documents (word etc.) and are written in version control commit messages while checking in, tagging and branching.
In a 2.0 fashion commenting is like when a user read a blog and comment it adding a comment to the post. Thinking the code as the content lets developers to add comment to the code. In this way other developers to browse the code content and to read the history comments on it. Comments are now content and follow the same life cycle of the code because they’re linked to the code.

Content Tagging
Tagging lets a developer to add some extra information about his code. A tag helps a developer in declaring a purpose of something inside his code. Already, developers use tags in their code development having several purposes:

to remark to do list
mark code generation (xdoclet docet)
to appoint something to remember
to maintain a group of file of different revision as a version (version control tag)

In the principle of thinking code as content, a developer can tag everything with differently kind of tags.
Thinking about a tag name space, development should implement a thing of tag purposes (architecture: component, assumption: statement, etc.) where tags are “tagged” with a name space and a user or a content aggregator should aggregate for that specific tag. In this way, a user can filter for a specific tag to have a specific context idea of the application. For example, filtering for the “architecture” name space lets to retrieve all the contents about it and have an architectural idea.

Content blogging
Blogging helps developers in sharing ideas that sit around some implemented codes, like a way of explaining the reason of why a portion of code is implemented in such way. Blogs are per user, and are linked to the content that has originated the thoughts.

Bookmarking
When a developer finds something good, he bookmark it on a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us and shares it with others.
On the principle of code as a context, each code snippet can be thought as addressable content and those content should be bookmarked directly on a bookmarking platform.

Endnotes
Code in this era is becoming a content, and everything circle it. Code, comments, tags, bookmarks are exchanged in the developer environment so that other can see what is going on.
The syndication lets users to subscribe to a set of topic and to be notified when something in the development process occurs of the interested topic.
Developers should work in a community as a community where there is friendship between them. Development community should aggregate in a community application all the developers that produce their archetypes there.

I would like to evolve this idea of Developer 2.0 in future topics, where I can go in depth in concept like friendship, blogs and tags or tools around developer 2.0. Stay tuned on this blog to check how these ideas are evolving and how I’ll do to make them possible.

Learning on the Wave of what is going on: the Twitter Way

Francesco Mondora — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:44:00 +0000

Well socialware is shifting from a buzzword to really good implementation that help in develop and know faster what is going on right now.
I would like to write this post, to show how I’m using twitter and why I think twitter is a good social interaction tool.
Twitter enables users to configure a Gmail account which receive twitter messages from their friendship. This could be considered as another gateway of the flooding information, where people is still a passive victim of what is going on.
The twitter bot can be instructed and if you there are custom messages that instruct the twitter bot:

with on you are asking of being flooded about messages;
with off your are asking to shut up.

But, how can I gain benefits from the public twitter time line?

Twitter bot allows to track something on the time line and to grab it in your gmail jabber account. In this way, if you want to start learning what’s going on in a specific topic just issue

track specific topic

And the twitter bot is instructed about it and you start receiving a flood of information that contains the specific topic and when a user around the world is citing a specific topic, you will receive notification about it without being friend.
This is a really powerful mechanism I use to learn what is going on, and to have it notified on a client application like iChat or other instant messaging client. I read fast the topic notified, and I chose those topics with goods links.

If you want to learn about fashion, or thinking about a gift just instruct your bot:
track fashion
track gift

And coming back just issue untrack keyword to stop receiving notification from the network.

To configure your bot you need:
- a Google talk account following the Google site
- a twitter account configured to deliver to your Google account in the device section of your account settings

Now you can setup a client and start enjoying what’s on your wave!

Developer 2.0 – part 1

Francesco Mondora — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:30:00 +0000

Web 2.0 is not only a buzzword that makes people better, it’s a movement of things that shift from an era to another. 2.0 is making us passing from a mindset to another. The previous mindset is based on the concept of big corporates, big organizations, big teams, big projects, big strategies; the next mindset will focus more on people, on thinking about organization of people and to trust them.

Software development is playing the game of 2.0, and agile methodologies are only a small anticipations of what is in the next scenario. People, with their human values plus technology knowledge are now becoming the central actor of 2.0 era.
People, in their flavor as friends or colleagues are emphasized from the movement and their network is amplified to get them rid of the hierarchy, the title, or position, and to leverage on values and benefits they give to a social environment.

Developer 2.0 is making upgrading the developer’s concept moving from a developer as a resource in a production chain to a developer as a Person that creates value to the process. This is an opportunity that corporates already know and have implemented in the past through partnership agreement between corporates where the objectives of the partnership were values. Now it is time to make Developers thinking that they can think a development environment as a community of partners where they work for the same objective on the same horizon, and everything is shared. Individual knowledge becomes a group knowledge, and individuality is preserved by the mechanism, as though it was when corporate was partnering in respect to their identities.