Opportunistic social networks for academia

This paper begins by describing the behavioural shift in online interactivity and how it has empowered the growth of online social networks and emergent forms of social awareness. It then discusses the notion of decentralised, peer-to-peer social networks and how this has been largely motivated by ideals that include giving users greater control over the data that they share in order to protect their privacy. At the same time it discusses the motivation for opportunistic contact that takes place when people are in geographical proximity (e.g. in the same office or attending the same event) and how those opportunities seem to establish the right context in which one can share and interpret ideas. Based on the hypothesis that the value of opportunistic contact in decentralised, peer-to-peer networks is more than the sum of its parts, we describe the deployment and evaluation of an application that lets users build opportunistic social networks, making use of decentralised, peer-to-peer infrastructures to ensure that users are in control of their information and leveraging geographic proximity for the exchange of ideas at the right place at the right time. The evaluation of this approach in an academic environment establishes opportunities and challenges for opportunistic social networks and a clear potential of this approach in terms of trust, context, and filtration to increase and improve social awareness.