As I pointed out here and here, one of the upcoming challenges for every CMS out there will be support for social networking. If companies want to leverage new ways of marketing in which a „who“ counts more than a „how many“ marketing people need the tools for making that happen. This means better company-consumer and als consumer-consumer communication is needed. Thus it makes sense to think about how to add such functionality to Plone (at least as add-on products).
And there seems to be growing interest in getting it done. To channel this interest and make something happen I created a Google Group to discuss the matter more, collect use cases, group them into projects and products and organize some work on them. You can reach it here:
http://groups.google.com/group/plone-social-networking
Feel free to join the group and the conversation.
Ideas already floating around is of course a basic network structure based on probably plone.app.relations, rich profiles (maybe via membrane or other means), invite functionality, shared editing/viewing permissions based on relationships between participants etc.
My personal goal is also to have a basic framework available for experimenting with practices which come out of the Data Portability Group.
So help us make Plone not running behind this social networking trend but be part of it!
Technorati Tags: plone, socialnetworking, dataportability, cms, opensource