Re: Issue-19 questions remain - a proposal

> On 22 Apr 2015, at 00:53, Bassetti, Ann <ann.bassetti@boeing.com> wrote:
> 
> Could you hack together a prototype of this idea, Henry? I vaguely get the gist, but it would be so much more useful if I could see your idea in action. And, you know, Demos R Us!

yes, that's relatively easy. It does require some minimal work by each member of the group though.

1. Each member has to have a blog which supports lets say Atom XML, and they need to tell us what that
  blog is. They could just make a blog by using any of the thousands of tools out there such as  wordpress.
  For more geeks out there they can just write the XML out by hand - that's what I have done recently.

2. To tell us what their blog is. They can do this in one of two ways:
  a) give us their WebID with the WebID describing their blog as described in my previous post. This would allow them to change their blog at any time without bothering the working group admins
  b) or if a) is too techy for you, just give us the blog URL ( which needs to have a link to their atom feed ),  and we can add that info to the foaf:Group profile that the W3C will publish

Of course everyone who writes out their foaf profile gets extra points, since they show independence and remove work from the admins. It also means they can keep that info up to date.

So that is as much as we need from each group member.

Then we need an automatic way for people to read the foaf Group, follow its members links, and build an RSS list from it that existing feed readers can understand so that they can then load that list into existing feed readers. I think there was a standard for that a while ago, but I stopped tracking that space, and I am not sure what the widely deployed standard is now.

We'd need everyone to make sure they regularly updated that list from the foaf:Group published by the W3C, in case new members joined or left. Then of course it would be up to different people to create user interfaces to do the same thing directly, so that the foaf:Group could be polled regularly, and automatically. 

I suppose the only thing I'd need to build would be a foaf:Group reader that would follow the foaf:weblog links and build the required files to make a proof of concept. I'd love of course to have a Facebook like wall for W3C posts on my own home server, but that requires getting a designer, writing a lot more code, and since everyone probably has different preferred blog readers that would only be useful for me.

Is there a way to test if there is consensus to build this?

Henry


> 
> Can someone say how the pump.io or indieweb or any other community discusses stuff? That is, outside of email.  
> 
> I agree we seem to be guinea pigs, demonstrating a real-life social use case.  (I was going to say "rat hole" .. but that seemed to be mixing my rodents!)
> 
>  -- Ann
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: henry.story@bblfish.net [mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net]
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 3:41 PM
>> To: Halpin Harry
>> Cc: public-socialweb@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Issue-19 questions remain - a proposal
>> 
>> 
>>> On 21 Apr 2015, at 23:22, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -- Is there a way for the wiki to send a notification when there is
>>>> an update? Does that happen via the Watchlist? (Personally I find it
>>>> hard to have to go look, randomly, for updates. That feels really
>>>> unproductive.)
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> We might be able to, although that would flood the mailing list. Thus,
>>> it seems wiser to simply note major changes in the telecon.
>>> 
>>>> -- Should we agree to use the "Discussion" pages?
>>> 
>>> We could, or just see the note re IRC.
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Or is IRC the place for conversation?  It's great to use Loqi to tell! someone
>> (who's not present) something. It's great that there are daily logs.
>>> 
>>> Of course, the larger problem may be some people simply may not want
>>> to discuss with each other, due to time constraints or fundamental
>>> disagreements. Again, that's not a WG issue per se nor solvable by a
>>> resolution. We cannot, for example, make a resolution saying "Tantek,
>>> you have to spend whatever time it takes to agree with bblfish even
>>> though you two disagree about how specs should be built."
>>> 
>>> That being said, I think the IG should volunteer to host a discussion
>>> over Henry's stories.
>>> 
>>> I'd like to stick the WG to technical topics that are clear and
>>> delimited rather than working style differences that are open-ended.
>> 
>> I think Anne is asking: "how would this work even if people were willing to
>> discuss things". Clearly if people don't want to listen to each other and
>> discuss anything, but are just pushing an agenda then it is going to be difficult
>> to get to anyway close to a consensus, and consensus building is the mission
>> of the W3C.
>> 
>> I understand that there are very strong divergences of methods and
>> undersanding of the space we are in. I have gone through all of them myself
>> at various points in the last 10 years. In any case at the face to face it was
>> agreed in fact that the group is not going to push for one standard because
>> the divergences are too strong at the moment. But for the divergences to
>> reduce then we need to have communication.
>> 
>> So let's assume we do want to communicate, and look at the issues we can
>> deal with, namely buidling a process for communication. After all we are
>> trying to build a social web. Now there are a number of tools that one needs
>> to build to have a social web.
>> 
>> One needs a way to send everyone in a group a message to alert them of
>> some project or idea, so that the whole group can focus its attention on a
>> particular topic. What tools can one use for this?
>> 
>> a) mailing lists have until now been very good and served the W3C and IETF
>> well, as they allow a message to be sent from one to many
>> b) Wikis are not good unless the whole wiki has an RSS feed that people
>> would be expected to add to their blog reader and poll regularly. This as you
>> point out might be very noisy.
>> c) IRC channels have a way to ping one person, but not to ping the whole
>> group
>>  ( the gitter chat for github has an @all, but that ends up working by sending
>> every
>>   member an e-mail )
>> 
>> So if e-mail is out by Tantek's decision, and neither wikis nor irc channels are
>> the right tool for the job, then we have the following question:
>> 
>> Q1: How would one do one to many communication using the Social Web
>> without relying on e-mail?
>> 
>> This is a question we MUST answer. It should be part of our user stories,
>> since it is holding us up here. (But it is difficult to answer this if we don't have
>> a channel to communicate about the various ideas on how to answer it,
>> before we build it ).
>> 
>> If we are to be able to do this now, using tools at our disposal, we need to
>> use existing standards.
>> Lukily I think they are available, and have been for 10 years. We could do it
>> like this:
>> 
>> One answer is that the Social Web WG could have a URI, lising each member
>> of the group by their WebID, and that each WebID profile could describe that
>> user including a foaf:weblog relation to their blog ( which has a relation to
>> their RSS Feed where they can post their messages ).
>> 
>> Eg the social Web WG would have
>> 
>> <https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg#grp> foaf:member
>> <http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me>,
>>                                                  <http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/foaf.rdf#me>, ...
>> 
>> Then each of these WebID profiles would have a relation relating the user to
>> a blog like this:
>> 
>> <http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me> foaf:weblog
>> <http://bblfish.net/blog/> .
>> 
>> Then by a drag and drop operation on the Social Web foaf:Group into a feed
>> reader, the feed reader could fetch all those blogs, find the linked rss feeds,
>> and poll those regularly ( once a day at least ), and show the group member
>> what others have read. Perhaps we'd have to agree that blogs related to
>> social web WG would be tagged by a special tag, so that we could filter out
>> people's cat pictures from the discussion relevant to the topic. The W3C
>> could index all those posts in an archive.
>> 
>> To do this we would not need to invent anything new, but we could use
>> existing standards such as:
>> • Atom feeds
>> • foaf profiles
>> 
>> We'd still perhaps need to agree on a link relation to state that one atom
>> entry was a response to another one. Is this all we need to do?
>> 
>> 
>> Henry
>> 
>> 
>> Social Web Architect
>> http://bblfish.net/
>> 
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Tuesday, 21 April 2015 23:14:48 UTC