This project, by necessity, is collaborative and so I'll write something about it here and see if anyone bites.
The Hedgehog Project, on the surface, is pretty straightforward: Standardized communication between content management systems that transcends simple aggregation, allowing individuals and businesses to share information specifically with those that they wish to share information with.
If you look at Facebook and other similar social networks, you see individuals given simple blogs centralized on one site. The technology isn't as difficult as people make it out to be and those of us who have worked with content management systems know this. The magic of any of these social networks is really in the community that supports them, akin to what made The Huffington Post successful. With server hosting becoming more flexible and issues of privacy almost always on the forefront of social networking issues, the feasability of democratizing social networks from de facto 'monarchies' increases. As people become more educated on technologies surrounding the Internet and these same technologies becoming easier to use, it also becomes more feasable.
That's the center of the Hedgehog Project idea. A philosophical root of it remains Schopenhauer's 'Hedgehog Dilemma', where there is a constant dance of intimacy between hedgehogs on a cold winter's night - too far, they do not share warmth, too close, they get pricked by each other. Present systems of social networking don't allow for this very well, if at all - at one time, one might be intimate with someone on a social network, but you may drift from them as your focus shifts. Yet the weight of the relationship in the software itself does not adjust to this and it is unlikely that such minute adjustments can be done through one company.
Further, instead of one company making lots of money off of the content users provide, and the privacy that users sacrifice, people could capitalize on their own content and set the price for their own privacy - be responsible for their own privacy. This, of course, will require users of social networking tools - and even social media tools in a larger sense - to take that control. It's the price of freedom.
That, in a nutshell, is the Hedgehog Project Idea. I'd touched on it previously and more verbosely on the previous incarnation of the site but it was a little too verbose and meandered too much because it was only then crowning. Being approached as a project now, it will become more standardized and focused.
As a collaborative project that is *open source* content management system agnostic, I'd be interested to hear what other people think of the idea. I have some technical requirements already fleshing out on the open standards, but it is possible that this idea is ripe enough for others to wish to collaborate on it. And it will require collaboration from all open source content management systems, at least to a degree of modules or their analogs.
