Wave Federation: Building An Open Network

To encourage adoption of waves and ensure users have a choice in their wave provider, Google Wave was born with an open federation protocol (waveprotocol.org). Any organisation can be a wave provider by running their own wave server that interoperates with other wave servers. It is similar to the way that anyone can put up an SMTP server and host their own email today. This talk covers the underlying operational transformation algorithm that is necessary to run your own wave server, how operations are communicated between different wave providers as well as the data format inside waves. This brief talk includes a description of what a wave is, a theoretical description of what it means to share waves and details of the protocol. David, one of the architects of Google Wave, flew all the way from Sydney to meet you!