The social web increasingly defines the Web itself. The Web is more than hyperlinks between documents, as the web ultimately consists of the links between people. Integrating the ability to co-operate socially on the Web via open standards has the possibility of unleashing a new round of innovation that would benefit everyone on the Web.
The W3C has engaged the open social web since 2009, when it first hosted the "Future of Social Networking" workshop in Barcelona. While the workshop engaged a large number of stakeholders, it failed to garner enough industry interest and thus the Social Web Incubator Group was created to survey the open social web. The Incubator Group produced a high-level report of the standards landscape and a number of suggestions in their report, and included a number of suggestions for improving the W3C in order to make it more lightweight, suggested that led to the creation of W3C Community Groups. The W3C then started a number of community groups around relevant social standards (The Federated Social Web, OStatus, Pubsubhubbub) and hosted a developer-centric Federated Social Web 2011 conference in Berlin that brought companies such as Google together with grassroots activists (including activists from Egypt) and developers. While the conference concluded with a focus on adding secure group functionality to existing protocols, there was again not enough major industry interest to start a Working Groups. Then the W3C hosted, with the help of IBM, the Social Business Jam that led to the creation of the Social Business Community Group and this workshop. Thus, we hope that critical mass can now be achieved to start a Working Group in this area.
The initial attempt to create an "open stack" for the social web happened outside of traditional standards bodies like the IETF and W3C. This in turn led to a very fragmented landscape of standards that have had mixed deployment with some success and some failures. However, there are a number of disadvantages of the approach of creating a "stack" of technologies outside of a standards body. In particular, there are:
In combination with the OpenSocial Foundation, the W3C can help address each of the above concerns by 1) providing a single unified royalty-free IPR policy 2) a Working Group with clear responsibilities for editor(s) and chair with management structure 3) providing a primer and integration of examples into the Open Web Docs with the rest of HTML5 4) Adding client testing into the git maintained HTML test-suite and a clear server-side test-suite 5) re-factoring current specifications around HTML5 (in particular, Web Components and CORS) 6) Providing a broad test-suite and integration of the social web with security-oriented work such Content Security Policy, the Web Cryptography API, and wide security reviews with related work at the IETF. Future work should have a clear focus and work in a unified manner, ideally with a single group with a well-defined timeline and deliverables.
In particular, security considerations have received less attention that needed on the social web, with the paradigm of an unauthenticated public broadcast of messages failing to provide the elementary security considerations needed for closed groups and valuable information, which are requirements for many use-cases ranging from sensitive corporate information to human rights activism. Any open social web that fails to take on security considerations will be abused by spammers at the very least.
Any new effort for the social web should clarify the threat model and propose mitigations so that the open social web can handle high-value information. For example, any attempt to broadcast messages needs to have the sender authenticated, and so by nature all messages should be digitally signed with integrity checks, lest a malicious party strip the signature and replace it with its own when substituting a false message. For sensitive information, the message should itself be encrypted and de-crypted only to those in the group. To allow messages in distributed systems to be re-integrated and ordered correctly (as originally tried with Salmon Protocol), time-stamping is necessary. Lastly, it may be incorrect that a distributed social system that isn't properly designed is actually more secure than a centralized silo: considerations should be made that the ability to post presence updates does not store more information than is necessary in a centralized location (as is currently done by XMPP servers for example) and for use-cases where high latency is allowed, constant rate background traffic and mixing can prevent traffic analysis threats.
The result of this workshop will determine the future of the open social web. Concretely, this will consist of a report released within one month and then possibly, if consensus is reached and there is enough industry interest, one or more charters for Working Groups. The W3C welcomes joining forces with the OpenSocial Foundation and numerous grassroots efforts both inside (Pubsubhubub, OStatus) and outside the W3C (ActivityStreams, IndieWeb) in making social should be a "first class" citizen on the Web.