Even if unfortunately Bergcloud is a dead project now (and that it sadly brought down the design collective Berg too), I mention it here on our research blog as it probably has some connections with our own research project and what we might try to develop later as tools. The unsuccessful commercial approach of Bergcloud to connected objects should also be taken as a question toward this big “buzz” though.
Cloud Computing workshop at CHI2011
It’s as if the human-computer interaction community haven’t really addressed (yet) cloud computing, especially in the context of personal cloud services. An exception is this workshop called “Designing interaction for the cloud” organized by a team from Liverpool John Moores University. Their goal was to bring together researchers and practitioners from various fields and “examine the impact of cloud computing on the design of the user experience at the individual and organizational level”.
The workshop introductory paper highlights various research issues related to the following challenges:
- Design for a fragmented user experience
- Interoperability – goals and reality
- Personal clouds and multi-sensory environments
- The cloud in non-commercial application domains, e.g. medicine, education
- Privacy and trust as UX issues
- UI standards and processes in Cloud design
Open Compute Project
The Open Compute Project was initiated by Facebook. They decided to fully open the specifications of their data center in Prineville, all specs (from hardware to software, through cabinet and building design, etc.) In this way, Facebook pioneered the open source approach that many major players are now adopting.
This resource will undoubtedly serve our project when it will come to think about the infrastructure.
ArkOS
A software project worth mentioning even so we didn’t have the occasion to test it yet. It looks like it technically follows some points we would like to follow too during our project, even so it is probably to much in its “infancy” (alpha version 0.3.1 at this date) and unstable at this stage for us to use.
CitizenWeb: toward a decentralized Internet
” Working towards a free, open and decentralized Internet for everyone.”
The arkOS project seems to be connected to this site, where you can also find “guides” for installing Linux. See the “CitizenWeb guides“. Version 1.0 is more than a year old though.
The redundancy
Certainly another key conceptual element of cloud computing. At least on the infrastructural side. A highly secured (yet paranoid) approach of hardware and software.
