Currently I am working on a approach to make social easy understandable as a design principle. One of the approaches I have taken for this is to split it in six design elements. Those elements are not mandatory in each social design, but at least one of them will occur in a social design:

• Connectivity: you need to connected, not as in a relation , but as via a wifi network, bluetooth, or any other way that enables you to share and retrieve information.
• Participation: things get better when more people participate (think of for example of the defacto example of Wikipedia)
• Data: data is the new oil, social media analytics, prediction markets, filtering etc. Everything you can do with data
• Identity: the individual, identified by several characteristics. Profiles can be optional, there is more to identity than an username
• Trust: social environment have a certain trust level in order people can and will participate
• Shareable: things should be worth sharing and it should be possible to share things with others

What do you think of these element of social design. Are these all elements, are there more element, can these element be merged, what would be proper definitions for these elements? Of course you’ll be credited for this when I use it in my presentations.