About

The Federated Social Web Summit Europe 2011 is supported and co-organized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and by the EU FP7 PrimeLife project. The local organization is done under the label “d-cent” and by the independent institute PerGlobal. The workshop is also supported by and will be hosted at the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, Berlin.

In summer 2010 the first Federated Social Web Summit took place in Portland (USA) to kick-start a test-case driven approach to getting the federated social web working. This will be the second summit in the series, and the first in Europe.

The W3C is the world’s leading international standards organization for the world wide web, consisting of over 300 members and founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely acclaimed as the inventor of the Web. An Incubator Group of the W3C has been investigating its role in the Social Web, and  produced a report “A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web” overviewing the landscape. W3C is exploring further into the Social Web with the WebID and Federated Social Web Incubator Groups.

PrimeLife is a three-year research-project on privacy, funded by the Framework 7 of the European Union. Thus it started in 2008, and its last workshop will be part of this conference. It focused as well on standards and prototypes on privacy in online-environments and virtual identities.

With the interest in establishing this conference, a small group of German techies, researchers, and activists started meeting in autumn 2010 in Berlin under the label “d-cent”. This and further organizational work is initiated and driven by Jan Schallaböck, Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz (ULD), and PerGlobal, an independent institute and consultancy, working on Digital Identity and Privacy.

The Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, the venue of the conference, is affiliated with the German Green Party named after Heinrich Böll, one of Germany’s foremost post-World War II writers. The Foundation provides support for science and research, art and culture, and developmental co-operation.

Font “Yanone Kaffesatz” by Jan Gerner, Yanone, Open Font License / CC BY 2.0 de.