The Bonfire project made a splash earlier this month by announcing the launch of the Open Science Network, an initiative to build a federated and open academic commons. Their blog post opens with a stirring call-to-action:
The scientific method must be liberated. In an era marked by misinformation, mass surveillance and political propaganda, corporate monopolies and platforms hinder scientific innovation and knowledge sharing.
Scientists, researchers, academics and their affiliated organisations must have control over the tools and medium they use to publish, review, share, study and discuss their work.
Bonfire Project
The platform itself is another one of Bonfire’s Flavors, with features specific to collaboration, publication, and public discussion. The Open Science flavor is currently a prototype, but it’s carefully being built with feedback from members of scientific research cooperatives.
The ultimate goal is to build something that suits the day-to-day needs of that specific community, while building novel features to make their lives earlier.
Features of Open Science
The Open Science Network site describes a handful of features that sets their effort apart from Bonfire Classic or even Mastodon. I could talk about the features and show off some slick screenshots, but I want to also talk about how these things can work together for a heightened user experience.
ORCID Integration
I think this is the first indication that the Bonfire devs really know their audience. ORCID is a single sign-on offering used by researchers and academics alike, and Open Science instantly allows people to use it.
ORCID is interesting, because it’s not just a login system, but an identity system that ties into a person’s published works. What this means is that it’s possible for Open Science to pull in published papers and research, sort them by publication, and share them to others in a digital space.
From there, it’s possible to discover other published works from people you follow, or pieces of research shared by people on the timeline. The Bonfire Project indicates that this could be a way for researchers to easily establish their professional work, while also having easy access to other sources of study.
Open Science also allows people to avoid a cluttered timeline filled with engagement bait, instead offering tools for people to subscribe to publications, research groups, and topics relevant to them. With this model, the whole space can open up for teams conducting research, to talk shop and share ideas.
Collaborative Peer Review
Another big aspect of research is the ability to exchange notes and ideas between peers in a community.
One area where this really shines in Open Science involves how research can be shared between peers. Researchers can either upload or import their work, which can be read through a built-in PDF reader. People can easily parse through the contents, and the document itself becomes a conversation thread for feedback and suggestions.
The Future Looks Bright
The release of Open Science by the Bonfire project is significant for several reasons. First and foremost, it is the first effort of its kind to attempt leveraging ActivityPub for academic use. It’s also a clear showcase of Bonfire’s modular architecture, composing a series of modules into a coherent distribution.
Most of all, it’s a validation of one of the project’s key pilot programs, where a system is built for a specific group of people, and tailored to their feedback. The idea that researchers and academics could directly benefit from this system, while also pushing Fediverse technology forward, is frankly awesome.
The Bonfire project made a splash earlier this month by announcing the launch of the Open Science Network, an initiative to build a federated and open academic commons. Their blog post opens with a st
Bonfire Offers Framework for Next-Gen Fediverse Platforms
Bonfire is inching ever closer towards a 1.0 release of its social offering, which is a landmark development for the project. But beneath the surface, there’s a bigger story going on: rather than simply being a social platform, it’s also a development framework.
As a project, Bonfire has been in development for a long time, taking on different shapes and forms throughout the years. It first emerged as CommonsPub, in an effort to bring ActivityPub federation to MoodleNet. After a long refactor and refocus, Bonfire seems to be hitting its stride.
“We want to be the foundation for the next generation of Fediverse apps,” Mayel says. When I ask what he meant by that, he elaborates.
From Bonfire’s “Safer Social Networking” article. The team wrote an extension for moderators to add Community Notes in response to misleading information. It’s a fascinating case study of how the platform can be extended.
“We designed Bonfire in a way that it is easy for users to extend, and add new functionality. Just earlier today, we wanted to add a new feature, and were able to add it in, in just under a few hours of work.”
Foundational Layers
I want to take a moment to peel back the layers of Bonfire, because I think they really set it apart from other platforms. The vision for the project is incredibly unique: “we have all the pieces you need, all you have to do is assemble it.”
Extensions
In Bonfire, Extensions are first-class citizens. The project’s developers have gone to great lengths to segment out features in such a way that they’re all modular, and work together as components.
In Bonfire extensions are not reserved for bonus features contributed by third parties (as is typically the case for many platforms), but every piece of the core software is packaged in an extension so it can easily be forked or swapped out for another extension with a different design or value proposition.
With so many extensions available, Bonfire offers developers the chance to pick and choose which ones to use, then bundle them together into a single app experience. Bonfire calls these experiences Flavors, and each one can be dramatically unique from the next, despite sharing 99% of the same underlying code. Bonfire ClassicBonfire Community The prospect is really interesting, and sounds similar to how a Linux distribution is used to ship a collection of software. Does this mean that Flavors are basically Bonfire distributions?
Circles, Boundaries & Roles
Access control and user permissions are huge concepts in Bonfire, intended to be applied to everything that’s hooked into the core platform.
There are three complementary concepts at work here: Users have Circles that are assigned Roles, and what those Roles can do is defined by Boundaries.
Circles
A circle is a pretty simple idea: it’s a group of your contacts, possibly bunched together by their relationship to you or one another. A circle could contain family members, co-workers, or colleagues.
Circles are pretty similar to how Aspects worked in Diaspora, or Collections work in Friendica: when you post, you can decide which circle can explicitly see or do something.
Roles
Roles can be thought of a set of permissions for interacting with a given resource. These can be one-off, such as not letting people reply to a Public announcement, but they can also be bundled together to account for how different groups of people should interact with the same post.
A demonstration of how roles can be assigned in federated groups. Source: Bonfire.
Boundaries
Bonfire defines boundaries as “limits you set for yourself and others to define what you’re comfortable with”. Within the platform, a Bonfire user can assign roles to a circle. In fact, they can be set ahead of time as a preset. For example, maybe I have a circle called “Colleagues”, who are assigned a “Work Friends” role. I’ve decided that anyone with that role can participate in any posts I make about my work, whereas anyone outside of that circle wouldn’t even see it in their timelines.
I can think of two benefits for this: one, it can help me laser-focus certain kinds of posts to the people most likely to be interested in it, and two, it can let me privately put something out to specific followers, and hide it from everybody else. This could be particularly useful with private group interactions, where a bunch of people in one workplace might have their own locked-down Bonfire group.
What’s Next?
The future for the project is incredibly promising. Bonfire is currently running a pilot program for the Open Science community, and is running a Community pilot program with Radio Free Fedi as a partner.
The project is also interested in collaborating with cooperative hosting networks to offer people cheap and easily accessible infrastructure to spin up Bonfire instances on. The logic in doing this is to reduce friction for prospective users, allowing them to join in immediately. Bonfire has submitted a proposal, with Co-Op Cloud and Bridge Seat Cooperative signing on.
Bonfire intends to ship a 1.0 release of Bonfire Classic relatively soon, and is doing a lot of heavy lifting in making sure every part works as intended. It’s an amazing project, and we can’t wait to see what comes of it. Expect to see an in-depth review shortly after the launch!
Bonfire is inching ever closer towards a 1.0 release of its social offering, which is a landmark development for the project. But beneath the surface, there's a bigger story going on: rather than simp
From Bonfire’s “Safer Social Networking” article. The team wrote an extension for moderators to add Community Notes in response to misleading information. It’s a fascinating case study of how the platform can be extended.
Bonfire Classic
Bonfire Community
A demonstration of how roles can be assigned in federated groups. Source: Bonfire.
