Channel
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A channel is like a play-list or content-schedule which people in a group can collaborate on, but can also exhibit many other specific associations such as venue and equipment. This can be used as a means of organising lectures, presentations or private media channels.
Channels are really just specific instances of the Communications nodal organisation which is responsible for ensuring all resources are available in the right places before needed, another instance is storage and distribution.
A kind of unification is taking place in the web applications arena where everything is starting to be seen as a specialised instance of the general "channel" concept. One technology that really started to move this concept forward was XMPP which provides the underlying communications and networking support for high-level functionality such as publishing and subscription services, chat clients and notification systems.
In 2009, Google took this concept even further with their Wave concept which is essentially a unification of email, chat, blogging and wiki which is defined as an XMPP extension (XEP). And now as of 2013 this general technology movement of unification is starting to spread even more and the next generation of social network looks likely to be in this form, for example Red, the new version Friendica is explicitly built on the idea of "everything is a channel" and is built on Zot which is itself a key technology in this area specialising in secure unified channel-based communications over many diverse protocols.
Another important aspect of our project here at Organic Design is that the technology we use for our system needs to be secure and peer-to-peer. The technology of the net is also now very much headed in this direction with technologies like Bitcoin, Namecoin, Zot and Bitmessage being of particular interest as they're not only peer-to-peer and very secure, but also are based on the "everything is a channel" concept.
See also
- Media channel - our project for setting up this functionality
