The Social-powered Network

The tech world has been moving for decades away from a centralized model managed by folks in the middle, to a decentralized one. Interactions increasingly spring up and grow directly between people, as they use new social networking tools to manage their interactions instead of depending on someone else.

For example, an application called SocialVPN allows people who don't know each other to securely set up connections between their computers over the Internet, with no centralized management to make it work. If you're not familiar with the term, VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and is a way for people, groups or companies to make private, secure connections over the public, untrusted Internet.

SocialVPN makes it possible to do this with no central IT department in the middle setting everything up. So if you're friends with someone on Facebook, for example, you can use that to exchange all the information you need to set up a secure, trusted connection directly between the both of you that is resistant to eavesdropping by anyone in the middle. Such connections can be used for private chat, photo exchanges, or even secured voice calls with Voice-over-IP (VOIP).

Librarians--but especially patrons--could really use this. Imagine a patron somewhere on the Internet making a secure connection to a reference librarian to get help on any topic. Someone who is too shy or isolated to walk into a library in-person and ask about sensitive topics could use a librarian's published details to make a secure connection. The librarian could then help the person using chat or even by talking if they're using VOIP. Things like this are what Michael Stephens, in his article "The ongoing web revolution" calls "Library 2.0". He cites Darlene Fichter's definition of Library 2.0 as:

Library 2.0 = (books 'n stuff + people + radical trust) X participation

Tools such as SocialVPN could allow patrons and librarians to directly engage with each other, without ever having to meet in person. In fact, a librarian could even anonymously provide services to patrons. In the era of National Security Letters, I find that thought reassuring.

If you want more information after looking at their web site, the creators of SocialVPN published a paper about it:

Juste, P. S., Wolinsky, D., Oscar Boykin, P., Covington, M. J., & Figueiredo, R. J. (2010). SocialVPN: Enabling wide-area collaboration with integrated social and overlay networks. Computer Networks, 54(12), 1926-1938. doi:DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2009.11.019