Tomorrow, 24/11/2009, the Workshop on User-generated Services (UGS2009) will take place at ICSOC2009 in Stockholm, Sweden. The workshop extends the notion of user-generated content, which is at the heart of the Web2.0 paradigm, to services. Can end users be empowered not only to contribute content to the Web, but to define their own, personalised working environment, creating and adapting functionality and services to their own needs?The workshop is co-organised and sponsored by the FAST project, and among others features two presentations by FAST members. Also, there will be an invited talk on the Open Alliance for Service Front Ends, for which FAST was one of the founding members.

About a year ago, when the project had just started, the FAST consortium met for the first time in Madrid and set out to create something new and fresh which would revolutionise the way gadgets and widgets are created and used nowadays. From those first steps to the final result we will be busy for three long years. Now that the first year has just passed, we would like to take a moment and reflect upon what has happened so far.

Like most projects in their first year, much of the effort was dedicated to coming up with the analysis and specifications which will lay the foundation for the future development, and make sure that the whole team is working with a common understanding and towards a common goal. In this respect, we have looked at and evaluated a lot of the current state-of-the-art and defined the conceptual model for FAST. The first version of the FAST gadget ontology has been made public. We are particularly proud that, even in this first year, we have already released two software prototypes. The two prototypes – the front-end Gadget Visual Storyboard (GVS) and the back-end Semantic Catalogue – are like the two flip sides of a coin and together make up the FAST platform. The GVS prototype allows you to interact as an end-user with a first version of our tool and compose your own gadget using a fixed set of parts (”screens”) already provided. With the Semantic Catalogue prototype, you can get your hands dirty using the catalogue API as specified in its technical documentation.

Also during the first year, some work has already been done with regards to the experimentation and validation of the project, specifying and designing a set of scenarios which will allow the testing of our prototypes and will be a good indicator to help us to assess which direction we must take in the future.

Finally, in order to spread the word, we have created and regularly updated the website you are reading right now, have distributed periodic newsletters, published several scientific papers at well-known international conferences and hosted our first FAST workshop in conjunction with the ServiceWave2008 conference.

The complete list of all public documents – state-of-the-art analyses, specifications, scenarios, methodologies, architecture, etc. – are available on the FAST web site.