[Social-discuss] Comments: GNU social relationship manager

[Matt Lee]

http://gitorious.org/social/pages/Relationshipmanager

# GNU social: relationships manager
## Functional Specification

Matt Lee
Last Updated: June 22nd, 2010

## Overview

GNU social is software to allow people to take control of their social
relationships.

This spec is not, by any stretch of the imagination, complete.

## Scenarios

In designing products, it helps to imagine a few real life stories of
how actual (stereotypical) people would use them. We'll look at two
scenarios.

### Scenario 1: Rob

Richard is a communications director for a small record label. During
the course of a typical day, he handles communication with customers,
suppliers, stakeholders, partners, press and artists. Sometimes, he
has to deal with people on the phone, but usually Rob is able to work
from a coffee shop on his 3G modem dongle, or weather permitting, from
his garden in sunny Peterborough, UK.

People are usually pretty annoyed with Rob if he's unable to meet a
near-constant flood of questions, comments and snarky-remarks about
his label's latest releases. This usually happens because Rob is
unable to prioritize his social networking -- Facebook forces him to
befriend lots of people, even people he doesn't know, given them
access to his personal data, telephone number and even the names of
his kids and other close family.

He is annoyed by all this, and in what little free time he has from
answering questions about his bands raucous behavior, is considering
alternatives.

## Scenario 2: Robin.

Robin is a typical social networking user -- she has her friends and
family on her network, including people she'd rather ignore. She does
her best to keep up to date with Facebook's ever changing privacy
policy and privacy setting changes, but often fails in this task,
exposing her innermost thoughts to people she's too polite to delete
from her network.

### Non Goals

The relationship manager does not expect to fix the following scenarios:

* Privacy of posted URLs to content -- once something has been posted,
  its URL can be shared or the photo/video downloaded and reuploaded
  elsewhere.

## Screen by Screen Specification

The relationship manager for GNU social consists of just two different
screens.

On the first screen, contacts are listed both individually, or as a
list of groups. Clicking a contact or group goes to the second screen,
whereas selecting multiple contacts prompts for the creation of a new
group, as well as allowing the user to add the selected contacts into
a group. For the sake of simplicity, contacts can belong only in one
group.

http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/red-relationship-1.svg

The second screen allows various privacy and relationship settings to
be made on the group. By default, GNU social will assume all
relationships are essentially meaningless, until stated otherwise.

http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/red-relationship-2.svg

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