Augmented Social Network

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The Augmented Social Network (ASN) was proposed in a June 2003 paper presented at the PlaNetwork Conference by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster. The paper makes the case for a civil society vision of digital identity that treats Internet users as citizens rather than consumers. The ASN is described as an Internet-wide system that enables users to find others who have relevant interests or expertise, in a context that engenders trust, so that they can form a social network more effectively. At its core is a form of digital identity that supports appropriate introductions between people who share affinities through the recommendations of trusted third parties. It also supports the distribution of media using the same Internet-wide recommendation system.

[edit] Objectives

The authors describe the ASN as having three objectives:

1. To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries.
2. To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society.
3. To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice to better engage in the process of democratic governance.

To achieve these objectives, the paper sketches a rough technical architecture that would "enhance the power of social networks by using interactive digital media to exploit the transitive nature of trust through the principle of six degrees of connection."

[edit] Elements of the ASN

The core elements of the ASN's technical architecture are:

1. a form of user-controlled digital identity that is context-sensitive, enables personal recommendations, and is built on open standards;
2. interoperability between web services (using open standards);
3. brokering services that can connect individuals who share interests in a context-sensitive manner; and
4. public interest matching technologies (ontologies and taxonomies) that enable effective Internet-wide searches.

The paper also includes a chapter on the implications digital identity has for an open society. The authors note that

your digital profile is a representation of aspects of your self that accretes over time. In effect, it is a cumulative digital proxy of you that is built from a pre-determined set of components. The emergence of this new kind of identity representation forces us to think differently about 'official' identity than we did in pre-digital times. Traditionally, in an open and democratic society, 'documented identity' is meant to be as thin as possible. However, in the digital age it will be different. Some form of digital representation of your identity will exist. It will, by its very nature, say more about you than your current forms of identification -- which have relatively thin information.

The authors call for an approach to digital identity that empowers citizens to form social networks in which they can exchange information, collaborate, and self-organize to benefit the public commons and democracy.

The paper, " The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next-Generation Internet" was published by the journal First Monday. In an interview with Geert Lovink conducted for Nettime, one of the co-authors, Ken Jordan, discusses the ASN in less technical terms. The ASN paper was the inspiration for the Social Web paper published by the PlaNetwork Journal in July 2004.