How Sygn Works

We need to construct outlines of how Sygn systems function, and how we envision the use-cases developing, so that it will be easier to cook up the suite of scripts that will eventually power Sygn.

A Basic Description of the Functionality

What follows is a basic description of how such a service might work:

All providers might make a make a file containing their profile. It would be a basic yaml file that contained some important information regarding: themselves, the kind of work they do, the specialties and interests they have, and perhaps of their experience. They then sign this file with their PGP key, to verify its authenticity, and they publish it by uploading it to a publicly accessible website.

The files are human readable, but they're not much to look at. While people will link to them, and people will likely read them in plain text format. They are meant to be processed pragmatically.

We will need to firmly define a template that constitutes minimum requirements. I think fields for original location of profile, email, website, name, projects involved with, xmpp jid, specialty, availability, seem like a good starting place, optional fields like avatar ID, on-line handle, seem worth supporting in the spec. Also, because custom fields are easy to create, it seems trivial to permit specific servers to be able to accept custom values, as long as users understand that any custom values may be dropped by the aggregating server at any point.

There should be a mechanism for submitting these "profiles" to profile servers. while files could be uploaded directly, sending an XML-RPC ping notification with the location of the profile file seems to be an obvious way to accomplish this.

Once the profile server has collected these profile objects, how they are processed is up to the administrator of that server. Custom fields might be dropped on the floor on some servers. Administrators might hand curate the list of profiles contained on their server by reviewing all profiles before they are included on their server. We might also expect some servers to pragmatically limit the kinds of profiles that would be displayed.