"You can find my CV on LinkedIn ..." - Privacy-Aware Distributed Social Networking for Research Facilities

Abstract

Being a part of any social network becomes a necessity especially for the sake of self-presentation. Specialized social networks like LinkedIn are aware of these needs and offer tailored functionalities like referencing to relevant projects and topics including specific searching functionalities.Since the social data stored within any centralized social network represents an alluring mass of information, security and privacy concerns come up within their utilization. As a consequence, guidelines for their usage are deployed within institutions to increase awareness related to these concerns. Unfortunately, the specific toolsets deployed within universities for presenting users and projects support neither the sharing of group-based or public information nor the ability to create social connections between users especially not over the borders of single institutions.To combine the need of self-presentation with the ability of virtual social interaction, we present a prototype of a federated, distributed, social network tailored to the need of researchers. Our prototype is based on Diaspora, representing the largest distributed social platform nowadays. Enriched with automated, user-related profiles, our Diaspora-pod offers all members of the University of Konstanz the ability to interact in combination with automated university-profiles.Tightly integrated in the existing infrastructure of the University of Konstanz and hosted on trusted infrastructure, the described prototype offers not only user-defined sharing of personal profiles in a federated way. It also leverages from the centralized handling of profiles and reduces as a consequence the administrative overhead of maintaining any personal information.Based on its simple usage and the tight integration into the services of the University of Konstanz, our prototype has the potential to push university life to a new social level without generating concerns about security and privacy.