Supernova OpenFlow 2008: A Year Later

Christopher Carfi | June 16th, 2009 | Highlights, OpenFlow

Open Flow is what happens when information moves freely among users, websites, and organizations. The power of networks is magnified when technical standards and business practices allow different communities and systems to leverage each other. This “conference within a conference,” sponsored in 2008 by BT, brought together leading thinkers and practitioners to discuss innovation at the edges through social networking platforms, microformats, open source, social software, and other manifestations of Open Flow.

Interested in sponsoring Open Flow 2009? Click here.

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Visualizing OpenFlow2008

www.flickr.com

More images from Open Flow 2008.

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Open Flow Conversation

“The conversation, featuring myself, author and consultant Elliot Maxwell, BT’s Jeremy Ruston, noted technologist (and Open Flow track chairperson) Tantek Çelik, and Chris Carfi of Cerado, covered an impressive range of topics around the meaning of openness in business. From standards that emerge bottom-up, to changing incentive structures in organizations, to the possible links between openness and tyranny, it was a challenging discussion filled with insights.” - Kevin Werbach

Open Flow 2008 call recording, 108 minutes (recorded live, June 3, 2008)

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Open Flow Presentation – Elliot Maxwell

What are the real-world benefits of open systems and standards? How much openness is a good thing? And how do organizations and services change as open access to data becomes the norm? This Open Flow session was led by Elliott Maxwell, Fellow of the Communications Program at Johns Hopkins University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the eBusiness Research Center of Pennsylvania State University.

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Open Flow Challenge Session: “Whose Social Graph Is It, Anyway?”

Within the Open Flow format, Tantek Çelik moderated  a “Challenge Session” entitled Whose Social Graph Is It, Anyway? In this conversation, representatives from Google, Facebook and session sponsor Plaxo squared off to offer their respective viewpoints on who really “owns” your lists of friends and connections online.

VentureBeat covered this session extensively, noting “During the panel, Facebook’s Dave Morin, Google’s Kevin Marks and Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr were discussing some of the broader ideas for how user data on social networks currently is — and more importantly, how it should be shared.”

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The Open Flow Conversations Continue

Open Flow 2008 was not limited to the presentation hall at Supernova. It seeded and catalyzed numerous discussions beyond the walls of the conference, including this coverage from CNET’s Dan Farber (”Facebook and Google Still Not Ready To Connect Friends“), a web TV show (”Socialweb.tv“) and a host of other conversations.

A great post from Phil Whitehouse caught the gestalt of what was possible in the Open Flow format. An excerpt:

“What made the discussion even more interesting was that the screen behind the panel was used to show the audience’s views on the discussion, via Twitter (using Summize). And then the screen was switched to show this blog post by David Recordon, who was in the audience, criticising Facebook for blocking Google’s Friend Connect service. Unbeknownst to him, this was on the screen while Dave Morin of Facebook was talking about their supposedly open policy.”

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Interested in sponsoring Open Flow 2009? Click here.