Making social networking open source

My recent post on the work of Sarvodaya Fusion noted that participants in the Android Smart Village project, and others with access to mobile broadband, are quickly adopting social media like Facebook and Twitter to build sharing communities for a variety of purposes.  This is an important development and raises the question about commercial social media, privacy, access to data, etc, etc.

I also recently noted on the marslab.ca website that there is a movement to develop open source social networking that sidesteps the Faustian bargain we make with commercial social media platforms.  The posting is here and I think it is an important starting point for a discussion among the project team about moving beyond the FOSS platforms we've initially identified (FLSMS, Ushahidi, FFone) to begin to explore the question of an open source ecology for social networking.