The mission of the Federated Social Web Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to provide a set of community-driven specifications and a test-case suite for a federated social web.
End date | 15 December 2011 |
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Confidentiality | Proceedings are public |
Initial Chairs | Evan Prodromou (Status.Net) Harry Halpin (W3C/University of Edinburgh) |
Initiating Members | |
Usual Meeting Schedule | Teleconferences: Monthly Face-to-face: Once Annually |
As our social interactions become the central point of our communication using the Web, there is an increasing need for a federated social web that any site, application, and device can easily join and share. In order for there to be massive uptake, the federated social web should offer a compelling experience for users. Furthermore, users would like to have the ability for these applications to respect the privacy of their social data in easy-to-understand and uniform ways.
The Federated Social Web Group's deliverables will primarily be a set of user stories with associated test-cases that build the core functionality of a federated social web, and the overall technical architecture for a federated social web should be investigated. One input for this architecture will be OStatus, which is an architecture combining Pubsubhubbub, WebFinger, ActivityStreams, and PortableContacts. However, many different kinds of architectures will also be used as inputs into the discussion, such as SMOB (RDFa and SPARQL) and XMPP-based architectures. The Federated Social Web Incubator Group will also strive to help mature the specifications that allow web developers to implement federated social web capabilities. These deliverables will apply to both social web-sites ran from the server-side but hopefully also to client-side environments such as desktop and mobile browsers.
Any architecture (like OStatus) or specification should be clarified enough to be easily implemented while allowing interoperability without taking away from innovation.
Each test-case will hopefully have three independent implementations and a clearly defined user story that can be understood by ordinary users. A test harness should be designed that lets the test-cases be ran as much as possible in a semi-automated fashion.
The Federated Social Web Incubator Group will work on the following:
Other documents may be worked on as necessary, such as:
To be successful, the Incubator Group is expected to have 10 or more active participants for its duration.
While open to all, the group especially welcomes as Federated Social Web Group members those involved in an implementation that implements the SWAT test-cases.
As this Incubator Group will offer resources to those involved in the Federated Social Web effort, it will be completely open and will transition into the Community Group process when that option is available.
Teleconferences will be held at least once a month to track the progress of SWAT. In general, teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular user stories of test-cases.
This group will conduct all of its work on the public mailing list (the public is invited to post messages to this list) public-xg-federatedsocialweb@w3.org (archive) . The group's Member-only list is member-xg-federatedsocialweb@w3.org (archive)
Information about the group (deliverables, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Federated Social Web Incubator Group home page.
As explained in the Process Document (section 3.3), this group will seek to make decisions when there is consensus. When the Chair puts a question and observes dissent, after due consideration of different opinions, the Chair should record a decision (possibly after a formal vote) and any objections, and move on.
This Incubator Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Incubator Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Incubator Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Incubator Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply.
Incubator Groups have as a goal to produce work that can be implemented on a Royalty Free basis, as defined in the W3C Patent Policy.
For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.
This charter for the Federated Social Web Incubator Group has been created according to the Incubator Group Procedures documentation. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.
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