Last week I got to be part of OpenEd09 - a conference hosted (for the first time) here in Vancouver all about openness in information technology and the education system. I had been invited to be on an parallel panel about copyright and creative commons but when I checked out the schedule I wanted in!

Fortunately the organizers were pretty cool and let me sneak in for free so I ended catching some amazing presentations and discussions, all now available on UStream. In particular I recommend Gardner Campbell on "No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences", Jim Groom on "The Design of Openness", and John Maxwell on "Wiki as CMS/LMS".

Jim Groom's presentation was about something he called a "syndication bus". As he explained what that was and why it was important it slowly dawned on me that this was exactly what I had created the week previous using Drupal's FeedAPI, RDF framework, the Thompson-Reuter Calais service and Twitter. Nice sychronicity!

I called mine the integral playground as it is focused on processing feeds related to Integral theory, philosophy and practice. Bascially it pulls RSS feeds, creates new Drupal nodes of the feed contents, processes the node through the Thompson-Reuters Calais service applying RDF meta-data, adds the ability to comment to the node, a link to mobile and printer-friendly versions, and sends a tweet to the "integralplay" twitter account with the node title, url and the #integral hashtag.

Today it apparently got noticed by some of the movers and shakers in the integral community as it suddenly started appearing in my TwitterFox.

Check it out and tell me what you think would make it better. Happy to share some of the 'gotchas' if you want to make such a beast for your own area(s) of interest.

Integral Playground website: http://integral.virishi.net