technology and community responsibility. Dan - EDIT, integrate links below into text.
What would happen (to privacy, to the media, to commerce) if search engines evolved into structured, aggregating databases? What would happen if machines could exchange, merge and reason about descriptions of people using standards-based, freely available tools? What should we do as these 'ifs' become 'whens'?
This section will cover the issues arising from the convergence of social networking, activism and Indy media concerns ("I'd like to talk to a FOAF who has been to Iraq..."). It will also gather ongoing projects like FOAFCorp ("Build a better corporate intranet! Reveal the hidden structure of contemporary capitalism!").
FOAF has many possible futures: utopian, dystopian, and the spaces in between. Modest technologies can have unexpected consequences. As a simple technology designed to encourage coincidence, FOAF opens up many possibilities. Moving towards mainstream use, we must balance wide-eyed optimism with sober assessments of possible unwelcome futures. FOAF is both a driver for change, and a readily accessible tool for understanding, adapting to and participating in this changed world. While FOAF is at heart a tool for describing and modeling our world, the Semantic Web is a tool for changing it.
- fatcats
Boy, those cats sure are fat! - foafcorp
Corporate friends of friends - they rule
They sit on the boards of the largest companies in America - IndyVoter
League of Independant Voters