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Great news! Our proposal for a talk called Interpersonal Content Management has been accepted into the 4th conference on Open-Source Content Management. Josh and I will be speaking at 10:15am on Friday, October 1 at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland.

In addition to providing me with a great excuse to travel to Europe, this conference will give me an opportunity to meet many interesting people. On the work end of things, it implies a few tasks for Josh and me to finish before leaving the country:

1. Write a user/developer/administrator's manual for frassle.
2. Set up a version control system.
3. Release frassle under the GPL.
4. Write the actual talk!

The talk will be about an emerging genre of content management we call Interpersonal Content Management. Here's the talk proposal:

Content management systems have found two compelling applications. The organizational CMS focuses many contributors around common business goals. The personal CMS, typically a blog, eliminates barriers to individual publishing. While organizational CMS recreates its social structures based on existing business relationships, personal CMS leaves its users to develop relationships from the ground up.

Bloggers express these relationships using simple mechanisms like linking and republishing. Because blogs provide a lasting, personal identity, they make it possible for social phenomena like reputation and trust to develop online. These in turn support informal communities of interest, offering their members ad hoc ways to collaborate without establishing a typical business relationship. We call this blossoming new usage Interpersonal Content Management. It is characterized by a fusion of content consumer and producer roles. By contributing incremental commentary on others' content—even by the implicit endorsement of linking—individuals make connections between their own interests and the interests of others.

Readers already use these connections informally to evaluate the meaning and relevance of new content. But by designing software to make the creation and discovery of such connections easier, we can make interpersonal content management more practical and scalable. First, users are empowered to quickly bookmark, rate, categorize, and remix content from anywhere on the web. Second, the associations they form in these actions are tracked by the interpersonal CMS, which then automatically suggests ratings and categorizations for new content. By making personally meaningful judgments about content, individuals not only prioritize items within their own CMS, but help those who trust them do the same.

This presentation explains Interpersonal CMS in terms of its technological features, the relationships it supports between people, the goals that drive its deployment, and the challenges it will face in the future. In each of these aspects, we contrast iCMS with existing notions of personal and organizational CMS. Specific references will be made to our proof-of-concept iCMS, frassle (frassle.rura.org), which will be open-sourced this summer.