Online Social Advocate

The Online Social Advocate (OSA) standard is a means of federating the currently centralized social network. OSA lays between the centralized and peer-to-peer models to provide robust message routing, but at a localized level, so the people communicating can retain ownership of their conversational data and it's metadata by-products.

Why OSA?

The centralized paradigm of Internet based social Media was marketed into place the first decade of this century, and exploded in the second. It is now, quickly becoming outdated. The centralized approach has served a valuable purpose in making it cost effective for the general populace to learn the benefits of online communication, and to mature the user interfaces for making those communications happen.

Today though, the personal information stored in the centralized paradigm is too rich a treasure, and too tempting a resource, with far too few controls, to keep it safe from the perils of human nature. The centralized paradigm also made sense when client devices, especially mobile devices, were too underpowered and cumbersome to reasonably handle stresses of multimedia communications. Today technology has advanced such that just about anything offered by the big services can be brought home for secure processing.

What is OSA?

OSA is a means of bringing the data management of external communications back under control of the communicators themselves as a solution to the problems presented by the big social data repositories.
OSA is the concept of having an online social advocate you trust to manage your affairs, much like you have a lawyer to manage your legal affairs and an accountant to manage your financial affairs.
More specifically, OSA is a set of standards for constructing a personal central communication router to pass messages between applications. One could say that facebook is an OSA except for three key points:

1. OSA environments are designed to be locally owned, run and managed.
2. A true OSA environment is based on the common communications Universal Social Data Protocol (USDP) built around the Universal Social Data Structure (USDS) that provides a standard social communication medium between disparate tools.
3. An OSA is a trusted advocate. One can hardly say facebook is a trusted data custodian.

In a more tangible (and technical) sense, one can think of OSA compliant software as a message broker program installed to a personal residence, or business, to locally manage and route communications based on a predefined rule set. It is not a program by any one author. It is any program that adheres to the OSA standards using the USDP and USDS definitions. It is similar in concept to a web server. Though Apache is the most common web server on the internet (as of this writing), it is not the only web server. Typically traffic adhering to standards can flow equally well through Apache as it can an IIS web server. The same goes for Postfix and Sendmail mail servers along with many other examples. These applications pass data between their selves and there technical counterpart transparently, though they are entirely different programs, because they all adhere to the same standard defined for their function. Change the words "OSA/OCE" for "mail server" and "USDP" for SMTP" and you will see the parallel. One major difference is that an OSA compliant software set will route messages from one client, to any other client. Data sourced from an OSA compliant email client can be received by an OSA compliant chat client as one example.

How OSA Works

OSA works within logical boundaries called the Personal Operations Domain (POD). The POD defines the boundaries within which direct API communnication with the OSA engine can occur. It is within the operational domain that data is passed between application via the single local OCE. Any entity not installed within the POD must receive passed data via standards compliant OSA engine to OSA engine communications working as an intermediary to the endpoint applications. The boundaries of a POD are defined in the OSA engine configuration as an operational domain, such as "TekAdvocates.com" for example, or a netmask like 192.168.77.0/24.

Using the above diagram the OSA concept can be explained through descriptions of it's relationship to the other entities with which it interacts. All solid lines in the diagram represent communications using the standard USDP supported by the USDS.

Home

OSA is designed to work from within a "home" environment. This isn't to say it must be a residence. The "home" is the personally owned location in which the OSA is installed. The "home" could be a business with the OCE supporting the communications of that business.

OSA Engine (or OCE)

OSA is a concept made up of a collection of technical and operational standards. The OSA engine is also referred to as the "Online Communication Engine, or OCE. The OCE is a software program written to comply with OSA standards and is the component that actually acts as the message broker routing data between sender and recipient.

POD

The POD is a logical definition of the boundaries within which applications and other OSA components may register and pass data to a local OCE. Any USDS data entering or leaving the POD must pass through the OCE. The boundaries of a POD are defined in the OCE configuration as an operational domain, such as "TekAdvocates.com" for example, or a netmask like 192.168.77.0/24.

PC

A "PC" is simply a personal computer, not implying any make or model. It makes no difference if a properly configured personal computer is running the Apple, Microsoft or Linux operating system. They will act as either a source or destination for OSA communications. A personal computer is presumed to be installed at the home location. The physical location of the device is not important however; as long as it is within the POD.

Appliances

Exactly what it implies, any appliance installed to the home. These days everything from the television to the toaster is being built with some degree of intelligence. It makes infinitely more sense that appliances be setup as your own minions reporting to your personal OSA Engine acting as their commander, rather than as individual spies reporting out to a third party every time you turn up your television volume, change your household temperature, or warm up a slice of your favourite rye.

Personal Mobile

Any network connected mobile device that is not permanently resident within the home. This could be a phone, a tablet, a laptop or any other device that eventually acts as a communication device, a person's car could even be made to fit this description. Even when a mobile device leaves the home, it still remains within the POD. The POD is a logical boundary on the network and has no geographic relevance.

Devices

Represents all network connected devices, whether they be a PC, mobile device or appliance. This consolidation is essentially just a way to simplify the diagram.

Trusted Third Party Host

This would be a paid hosting service with which you have confidence they are doing no mining of any data you pass into, or through, their service. While these listed functionalities of "WebSite," "weBLog," and "Gallery" are certainly capable of being hosted at the "Home" location, the diagram illustrates a third party being used as that would be a common approach, at least at first.

WebSite, weBLog, Gallery

These are common tools used on the internet to convey information. You may notice in the diagram that a portion of the "Trusted Third Party Host" box is outside the POD. This is to illustrate that these services are "Internet Exposed." An OSA Engine will always communicate with the POD side of these services. This external logistic of being outside a POD is shown in recognition that not everyone will have an OSA Engine installed. This relationship supports an example workflow of taking a picture on a mobile device, sending it to the OCE which in turn posts it to the "Public Gallery," (possibly in addition to routing it to other OCE's or applications). Once posted to the Internet facing gallery all forms of devices, whether in a POD definition or not, can access the posting through other common protocols such as HTTP. Hopefully the gallery is protected by a need to login, but this isn't required for situations like commercial event publication.

Summary

OSA is a concept devised to bring personal control back to the storage and transmission of data. This concept is meant to instil a sense of normalcy to our online communications. "Normalcy" means to be able to communicate with the same expectations as one would have in the physical world. It is not meant to secure communications in such a way it would never be misused. Such a guarantee cannot be made when telling a friend a secret eye-to-eye, and is not possible with online communication for the same reasons. We can however remove the guarantee of the current centralized social media paradigm; that your data will be molested during, and after transmission.