SocialPhysics is a new open source software project that is:
The SocialPhysics Dashboard is a downloadable application that helps you manage your identity and interactions with co-workers, customers, business associates and friends. Working in the background on your behalf it tracks your email and other electronic communications and builds a locally stored model of your networks.
The dashboard view display helps you manage your attention. It shows you whom you are paying attention to, and whom you're not. It provides peripheral vision into your standing within the various teams, groups and communities in which you participate.
It allows you to create and update distinct identities, or "personas" for each of the various contexts in which you work. Each identity indicates what aspects of you, your interests, and your relationships you feel comfortable confiding with highly trusted individuals or private networks or the entire web. These identities are searchable through your network of trusted relationships, enabling you to find friends of friends with common interests, specific expertise, and so on.
The Dashboard allows communities to share insights into "what's hot," and who's working on what, or what's not happening that should be. It helps communities manage their growth and momentum by providing metrics of trust, connectedness, centralization and so on. Each network community can define its own "social protocols"--cultural conventions about who can see what about whom, what's measured, what's private, what's shared.
The SP platform is a java, open source, plug-in-based, P2P, software platform that supports the Dashboard app, and new developer-created apps and plug-ins. It is based on the Eclipse Foundation's Eclipse 3.0 RCP as an application framework, and the JUNG graph package.
Using its API developers can create new kinds of "network protocol" plug-ins, as well as enhance building block components such as text content analyzers, and so on. Network protocol plug-ins define their own user interface components, metrics, information sharing mechanisms, and interfaces to external applications, systems and servers.
The platform embodies a set of principles that govern natural, real-world relationships. It is based on the idea that a person should have full control over information about themselves and their relationships with others. And since what people are willing to share and say depends enormously on the context, the platform makes it easy to create and join many different kinds of networks (e.g. groups, teams, and communities), each with its own rules for what is shared, what is private, and what is measured.