Mash-able Campus

So Web2.0 and Mobile2.0 together are a big swath of services and technology to consider. Really, these memes represent philosophy more than specific implementation details. In a previous post, I took a stab at some of the implications of these new ideas for college campuses.

One idea I'd like to throw out is the 'Mash-able Campus'. There is always an undercurrent in IT shops to create centralized content, but a college campus is different from an accounting firm. (That's not to say that mash-ups don't apply to more traditional enterprises, such as eBay). College life is a mix of academic, enterprise, social, creative, and political/activist interests. In many ways, IT on a college campus is a potential Web2.0/Mobile2.0 microcosm, where you can visit and experience all the ways that technology is changing and evolving. I don't think there's a better place to be for the geek-at-heart. So let's turn the traditional idea of centralized content on its head, and see what shakes out. How about adding parts of the campus experience as content and services that live within other applications on Web2.0? What would that look like? Are there any good examples already out there?

I'm interested, in the technology and information sources used by students in their day to day life. There are obvious answers, such as Facebook and MySpace, but what's beyond these social applications, and what will be possible in the future? Web2.0 would tell us that there won't be a central point for accessing everything, so perhaps the real strategy is to create services on campus that can be mixed in with the growing 'programmable web'?

Another question I have is around identity. How will Identity2.0, and the potential overlap between identity within the enterprise, and identity in the Web2.0 cloud play out? Dion Hinchcliffe gave a good summary of that issue:

This world of fragmented logins also has a lot of implications for the growing remix world of Web 2.0 mashups. These sites use remote Web services that require logins to access a user’s information on the remote Web site. The power and utility of these mashups are limited where there is no safe way to pass identity along to these others sites without providing a long list of user IDs and passwords.

I'm interested in things like OpenID, and how they work. A 'mash-able campus' would certainly need to participate in any evolving standards for Web2.0 identity.