The exploratory project SoNet

SoNet, abbrevation for Social Networking is a exploratory project at FBK Foundation (Trento, Italy) started in April 2008

The research is focused in two directions

Theoretical research on social networking

Our research focus is on modelling social networks, studying their evolution in time and which incentives and strategies are needed in order to keep them lively and successful. This is done both on social networking services available on the Web (Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, Wikipedia, ...) and on ad hoc services created by us. We are also interested in studying the impact of online social networking sites in the real life of people, for example analyzing impacts on their social capital.

Applied research on social networking

We aim to create social networking services in order to study social networking under controlled conditions and to transfer research and technology into something useful that can benefit our territory. We believe in open source and we tend to release all our prototypes as free and open source software.

• Utilizing Web2.0 tools inside our research institute FBK (sometimes this is called Enterprise2.0).
  We are investigating how tools such as Widgets, Mashups, Wikis, Shared calendars, Internal messagging change and improve the way people interact, collaborate and share knowledge.
  We have released Taolin,  the tool we are creating and testing internally in FBK, as Open Source. Please visit theTaolin homepage
• Young people and research: we will analyze how people outside of research, especially young people, can be involved in the scientific discover loop

Current projects

• Development and testing in FBK of an Enterprise2.0 tool, Taolin, released as open source. See  http://taolin.fbk.eu/
• LiveMemories: we study how a communities can be involved (in a Web2.0 style) in the creation and maintenance of collective memories.  See http://www.livememories.org
• Wikipedia Social Networks: studying networks between contributors in Wikipedia
• Trustlet is a cooperative environment for the scientific research of trust metrics on social networks.See http://www.trustlet.org
• Dycapo: research on Dynamic Carpooling (people sharing the same car) and its implications for social networking and social capital. See http://www.opensocialcapital.com/dynamic_carpooling/wiki/Main_Page