Comverse: A Federative-by-Design Platform for Community Computing

TL;DR

Comverse is a federative platform designed to support community computing at the infrastructure level, enabling autonomous community nodes to share data while maintaining control, thus facilitating easier development and use of community applications.

Contribution

It introduces Comverse, a novel federative platform that supports community computing at the infrastructure level, addressing limitations of app-level community management.

Findings

Demonstrates Comverse's applicability with real-world community apps

Shows how federation enables autonomous data sharing and control

Highlights improved ease of development for community applications

Abstract

Communities, ranging from homes to cities, are a ubiquitous part of our lives. However, there is a lack of adequate support for applications built around these communities. As a result, current applications each need to implement their own notion of communities, making it difficult for both the app developers and the app users (\ie the community admins and members) to create and use these community apps. In this paper, we argue that communities should be supported at the infrastructure-level rather than at the app-level. We refer to this approach as the Platform-Managed Community (PMC). We propose Comverse, a platform designed to this end. Comverse is predicated on the principle of federation, allowing autonomous nodes representing community members to voluntarily associate and share data while maintaining control over their data and participation. Through Comverse, we explore the vision of community computing by showcasing its applicability with real-world community apps.