Profile Page

Profile Page and Dashboard

There are three main audiences for a W3C profile page:

1. other people who want to find information on the person profiled
2. the person who owns the profile
3. the W3C as an organization

The former wants as much useful information about the profilee as possible. The profilees wish to control the perception of others, to increase their community standing, to highlight their accomplishments, to preserve their privacy, and other considerations. The profilee also wants a way to interact with, explore, and act on their online presence; this is the dashboard aspect of their profile.

What W3C wants is to highlight and incent particular activities within W3C's aegis; W3C also benefits from increased visibility of the profilee's activity within W3C and their external activity (e.g. within their company) that is relevant to their W3C work.

Project Daybreak

Currently, W3C collects enormous amounts of information passively through our mailing lists and daily conversations, but we don't shed much light into that; instead, we attempt to capture this through individual staffer's knowledge and the new CMS. This doesn't take advantage of the crowd-sourcing that our specs are developed through, and it isolates our community (and the staff) from richer interactions. By giving our community the opportunity to share information about themselves, we systematically collect more useful information, and we make W3C's murky site more inviting and useful to our community. I call this Project Daybreak.

Emphasis

Here are some of the activities and values that we want to encourage at W3C:

• Group participation (for IPR commitments)
• Editing specs
• Reviewing and commenting on specs
• Contributing tests
• Bringing new relevant work to W3C
• Actively, productively, and politely contributing to mailing lists
• Promoting W3C deliverables to a wider audience

The proposed profile page tries to address those goals explicitly or implicitly

Added Value to Members

An AC Rep needs to be able to keep track of their company's investment of resources in W3C, in order to make sure things are on track. By giving them a quick view into all the activities of their company's employees within W3C, we help them make a more efficient use of their time.

While in general, a user can choose to hide or show any particular data feed on their public view, AC Reps (and W3C staff) can see the complete profile at any time.

A company itself might have a "profile page" of sorts, including all the employees of that company who have W3C accounts, linking to their individual profile page. This would be a related, but additional, stage.

Note: ultimately, having improved tools (e.g., Gannt charts) to show progress of WGs and specifications would be something else that would add value to membership, and help us keep on track, but that's for later.)

Other Notes

From Open User Community Development main page.

User profile page

One thing we generally agree would be useful is a profile page with info about each W3C community member (basically a universal feature of community sites.)

Things to include in a W3C user profile page:

• name, email, URIs, phone(s) (default to a minimal set until we have fine-grained privacy controls)
• recent WBS polls submitted
• recent actions in tracker
• recent actions in W3C's bugzilla
• recent spec/code edits (via recent-commits)
• recent external blog posts, delicious bookmarks, tweets (a la friendfeed); possibly only when items contain certain tags, e.g. #w3c (could be user-defined)
• display a 'verified account' icon next to home page links if there's a link pointing back with rel=me or rdfa or something?
• input box to allow items to be filtered (e.g. recent commits) a la about:config in firefox

Issues:

• what ID to use for people? W3C member site logins? openid?
• what URI to use for user profiles? (and W3C community site in general) my.w3.org? community.w3.org?
• what ID to use for new users who do not have member site logins? assign a numeric ID that can be updated to an alphabetic login once some karma threshold is reached?

Interesting profile pages elsewhere:

• jyte.com (e.g. danbri's)
• danbri's SIOC user page (for sample IRC integration, etc.)

Various other notes:

• profile data should be published in FOAF form as well as HTML
• include rel=nofollow on outbound links until a certain karma threshold or stature in the community
• provide stats/graphics showing a user's contributions over time
• option to allow openid delegation, so users could "prove" they were this person for other openid-relying sites (and openid heavy lifting happens elsewhere)
• "Member view" is aggregation of user data? [what does this mean? -- gerald]

Karma Contributing Factors

• Up/downvotes on various contributions (emails sent, proposals, tweets, spec edits?)
• good/bad standing in WGs
• teleconf, meeting attendance (may be important to some groups but not others)
• number of commits to dev.w3.org; number of wiki/webpage edits?
• number of RECs edited; number of WDs edited, groups chaired, etc.

Interesting note from Paul Graham: "On Reddit, votes on your comments don't affect your karma score, but they do on News.YC. And it does seem to influence people when they can see their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away after making an asshole remark."

When questions and concerns are raised in a forum thread there may be people who want trackback functionality for when the thread is marked as resolved. Besides following to see if the questions posed are answered the person may want to vote on importance of the question, "me too". Perhaps individuals get a number of votes monthly based on their karma standing. People who satisfy the question will gain karma, reward granted by those who cast votes.