Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
The web was rocked this month with the tragic passing away of Aaron Swartz. A mixture of tributes, anger and loss have been widely expressed. Perhaps it was felt even more keenly by many in our group, as he was an active member of the linked data community. Let’s hope that one day we are able to make the technologies that he dreamed of building, a reality.
The Worth Economic Forum this year witnessed a session with timbl entitled, ‘What is wrong with social networking‘. I was particularly interested in Tim talking about a possible payments protocol at web scale.
A relatively quiet holiday period in the RWW still produced some interesting work. There have been some updates to existing projects and some new ideas on the ‘realtime’ aspect of the Read Write Web.
Communications and Outreach
Continued discussions with the GNU Consensus group, including Richard Stallman, have lead to the possible idea of creating a User Data Manifesto. A second draft of this concept is currently under way and could lay the foundations of some guidelines to help store data on the web in a way that offers users more control.
Community Group
Some great news in which, OpenLink announced they would donate their login widget to the community via open source. Some of the members of the Community Group have been working with Sebastian Trueg of Openlink, to add this ‘polyglot’ login system to read write web applications.
Some upgrades to existing applications. My Profile has undergone a redesign which has been very favourably received. I put together a little realtime web chat demo with encryption as a proof of concept.
Some exciting news over at MIT with two new upgrades to data.fm. One is to provide a control panel to make access control more user friendly. The other is realtime SPARQL updates over web sockets. I believe the proof of concept is already working in the tabulator project. More news on this next month.
Last but not least…
X-Editable, A really nice ‘edit in place’ system that could be used in conjunction with the read write web, has recently become available. It works with bootstrap, jquery or jquery UI so feel free to give it a try, maybe even tie it together with write standards!
Wishing all read write web enthusiasts a happy new year! 2012 ended with heated debate, at the World Conference on International Telecommunications over ongoing governance of the internet. Concerns had been raised that changes to the current groups, responsible for regulation, may have risk on the downside. It would appear that the system that is in place, will continue at least in the short term.
Linked data has announced another interesting initiative, funded by the EU, in the area of the linked geo web. The project is called “Geo Know“, and also has an associated Community group.
More work on RWW on distributed social identity and web apps, and some impressive demos. Some discussions on ACLs and some great demos have left us in a position of achieving much of what we set out to do in 2012. One personal thing that I’m happy about, is that I am now able to make web apps discoverable from my identity (homepage) using a new social web ontology.
Communications and Outreach
Some discussions on the social read write web has taken place with people from a number of project in the free software movement. In particular, GNU Social have said they are open to implementing read write web standards work, provided that someone can do an integration. A new system, GNU Consensus hopes to tie together many existing social net protocols. And freedombox have talked about a unified web interface for tying together your social systems. Look forward to seeing development in that area next year.
Community Group
A relatively quiet holiday period still produced some interesting topics. We now have an informal google plus community. Just ping the group is you’d like an invite. It’s open to people outside of the CG too.
One of my goals for 2012 has finally come to pass, in that I can now link “web apps” from my profile. This allows apps that are designed for the web discoverable from your own profile using the “webapp” predicate. An example can be seen here.
Applications
Fantastic work from Openlink in creating an open source widget that allows users to login via account from WebID, Persona, OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Windows Live, WordPress, Yahoo, Tumblr, Disqus, Instragram, Bitly, Foursquare, Dropbox and Github! This widget can be used to deliver the read write web to a huge audience of existing accounts.
Last but not least…
An enlightening review of technologies that have sprung up this year, entitled “The Most Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012”. The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed!
ISWC 2012 took place in Boston this year, with many from this group participating in, what I hear was a very productive conference. Many topics were discussed including refining the definition of Identity on the Web, and the split between identity, authentication and authorization.
One of the products of this, and some following teleconferences is the first draft of the spec entitled Web Identity and Discovery. This is a much shorter and focused spec than previous efforts decoupling identity on the web from authentication methods.
In light of the fact that this group has doubled in size in the last year, I’m delighted to announce that we have a second co-chair, Andrei Sambra, who has very kindly volunteered to help with the maintenance and continued development of the Community Group.
There are some impressive demos already for viewing here. Rob has posted a few threads about outreach in his group and is keen to see where the intersection of geo based augmented reality and the read write web can intersect. I’ve already heard interest from one person in the group that is thinking of building a privacy-aware application to allow check-ins to various locations, and allow you to share that with your friends.
Community Group
The Community Group is happy to announce that we will now have two co-chairs, to help manage the administrative tasks of the group and help out in general. As we have doubled in size in the last year, this will hopefully help us to achieve more as a group, and allows for future growth. Andrei is responsible for the my-profile.eu project, and is currently working with Tim Berners-Lee’s group at MIT.
This month was our most active to date, in terms of discussion. There have been a number of threads and also teleconferences to discuss, among other things, hot topics such as Web Identity, Discovery and Access Control.
Applications
There was some discussion on how to add applications to existing identity providers. There’s been some suggestions, however it may be a good if it were possible to add an application to a page or profile using a single “rel” link. I’m hoping we can get at least one implementation in the next month.
One interesting app I came across is a mockup screen designer. It writes your data to localStorage currently, but it might be quite neat to use this with write standards to save your designs to the cloud.
Last but not least…
Google have announced static site hosting via Google Drive. This can potentially allow read and write operations to the web and publishing aspects to a large user base, with an easy, intuitive and non disruptive user experience.
Lyon, France witnessed around 500 of the top minds on the web, gathering for, TPAC 2012. There were many great workshops and events as well as unconference style ‘breakout sessions‘. It was also the first opportunity for the RWW CG to have a face to face meeting, which I think everyone in attendance, thoroughly enjoyed.
We were also able to have some great interactions with the Linked Data Profile Working Group, who suggest that RWW using their upcoming REC track standards for building apps, would be a good fit. A milestone was reached with the publication of Linked Data Platform 1.0 Draft.
Some excellent RWW sessions, together with WebID and Federated Social Web sessions were chaired by, among others, Henry Story. Timbl generously gave us the best part of his time for the first two days, as we tried to hammer out some conceptual aspects of identity on the web and a plan to move forward for the short to medium term. There was much interest in the workshops and breakout sessions, which were mostly standing room only. Henry has sent a number of excellent reports to the mailing list covering the work done at TPAC.
Communications and Outreach
TPAC took centre stage as dozens of new connections were made, as well as, existing ones strengthened. IBM and Boeing showed interest during our workshops, as well as cloudiway, the dutch fire department and many more. Good work has already taken place between RWW members and the linked data profile team, which is hopefully a good sign of things to come.
There was some great dialogue with identity people at microsoft, chatting to microformats and some very impressive work by Mozilla. In general it was an energizing event, and I would cautiously suggest there has been an uptick in interest, from a wide range of participants.
Community Group
Lots of work happened this month prior to TPAC, in particular two proposals caught the eye. The first of which, rww-0 interop, describes a baseline set of tests that will provide a scalable identity, authentication and authorization structure for the read write web. The second was a set of use cases that could be used to model a rich social networking system such as facebook.
One positive to come out of TPAC is an appreciation of a clean modular architecture to emphasize a separation of concerns between, identification, authentication and authorization.
The RWW enjoyed its first F2F meeting, which I think exceeded all expectations. Perhaps the only criticism might be that we didnt have enough time to spend together, as many were only able to attend for short periods. Still much work got done, with many presentations and demos. We were able to demonstrate data.fm compliance to access control, provision everyone in the room with an identity, and show interop of various systems.
Applications
An interesting new web scale distributed social system under development, lifeshare, was demoed at TPAC. Currently it is in the French language, but there is ongoing work to improve it. One to watch!
There were also nice demos from cloudiway who plan to roll out their system to 15,000 students by end of year. My-profile.eu, which we’ve covered before, was demoed in a number of areas, and is now available as a virtual machine. Good luck to Andrei who is heading off to work with the team at MIT/DIG. That said, the above is only a small snapshot of all the presentations and demos that took place, there were many more people than I can name, that made awesome contributions.
Last but not least…
Ubuntu have announced an integration of WebApps on the desktop. The integration is a conservative first step but seems to be pretty well done so far. With Ubuntu predicted to ship on 5% of PCs worldwide next year, this could be the start of an interesting marriage between the web and the desktop!
The Technical Plenary is the place where W3C working groups come to meet. This year it will take place in Lyon, France, from 29 October to 2 November, at only 2 hours from Paris by TGV.
In particular the members of the WebID, Read Write Web, and Federated Social Web Community groups will be able to use the occasion to meet (a first for Community Groups at TPAC!). This will be a great occasion test out software for interoperability, discuss standards, as well as meet other W3C members. It will take place on Monday October 29 and Tuesday October 30th. On Wednesday during the Plenary there may even be an occasion for other W3C members to get to learn more about what the WebID and Read Write Web Communities have been working on.
As Q3 of 2012 draws to an end, many have noticed the launch of version 0.1 of, tent.io. Inspired by the WWW and Xanadu, tent aims to be distributed protocol using HTTP URIs to identify users, and communication via HTTP and JSON. With over 2500 signups on the first day, it shows some promise as a new breed of social net driven by HTTP. Hopefully it will, long term, be compatible with Linked Data!
Two interesting read-write linked data tehcnologies move forward, with the first “editors draft” of Linked Data Basic Profile (LDBP) which interestingly mandates using turtle, and an update to JSON PATCH.
The RWW has got space at TPAC from Mon 29 Oct through Wed 31 Oct, thanks to Henry Story and others. There have been further discussions on trust, universal access control, and some interesting conversations over at the WebID CG with Ben Laurie of Google, on deployment, usability and privacy.
Communications and Outreach
It’s been tentatively agreed to merge the RWW CG with the “Uncertainty and Trust in the Semantic Web” CG. This is mainly due to the fact that “untsw” has fallen inactive, and the majority of members, are already in RWW. Many thanks to Coralie for helping facilitate this, the plan is to discontinue untsw by end of October.
There’s been some discussions with the Web Application Store CG about unifying meta data that can be associated with apps. With so many app stores out there, growing fast, the application store bootstrap will hopefully be a great chance to give users of the web, many more features.
Community Group
The RWW has a room at TPAC, for Mon 29 – Wed 31 October, thanks to Henry Story and others. Please dont forget that early bird registration ends October 16th. Please put your name down on the wiki if you intend on coming.
Aside from the merger with untsw there’s been a few interesting discussions on trust, both in the RWW and on the payments list. I’ve made some notes in our wiki. One idea that I particularly liked from payments is that it is possible to indicate your trust for someone by offering them a credit line. Perhaps an exciting way to get the web economy going.
Applications
The theme of dogfooding has come up again and members of this group have been encouraged (lead by Kingsley!) to sign their emails using S/MIME.
The reason for this is to bootstrap email to the web using the “follow your nose” pattern. You receive an email, then click on the signature, and it takes you to a Web Identity. From there you are into the social graph, can friend the person, view the wall etc.
The advantage of this approach is that it can be performed by both humans and machines using well established web standards, hopefully helping to unite the world of email and the web in a social and machine readable way.
Last but not least…
It’s been around for a while, but for some reason may not have got the attention it deserves, viejs, the Semantic Interaction Framework, is a great companion to the javascript RWW. Some great demos, an auto complete bar, and plugins to make CMS content editable are just a few of the great feature in this package. If you have any feedback feel free to post to our mailing list where the maintainer, Henri Bergius, has kindly offered to answer questions.
This month, 10,000 hackers gathered, at CampusParty Berlin where an excellent keynote was delivered by timbl. From my notes, there seemed to be some excitement about the maturing of the Open Web Platform, HTML5, and encouragement to deploy apps to the Web, and become “part of the discourse of humanity”.
A happy birthday is in order, as W3C Community Groups (including this one) celebrate their first birthday! The W3C is accepting feedback in general, so if you have comments please take time to fill in the questionnaire.
Despite holiday season, there has been some productive discussion on hot topics of delegation, access control and the application space.
Communications and Outreach
RWW Community Group welcomes new members, including Manu Sporny, chair of the W3C Payments Group, and also the DERI institute, the European powerhouse partially behind LOD2, and many other linked data projects.
Community Group
Thanks to Sebastian Tramp, Henry Story, Andrei Sambra and others for putting forth an excellent paper on Delegation. Much to be digested there as the conversation advances.
A very early proof of concept for a Web Application Market is released which will hopefully help to : showcase apps, allow payments and let users add more functionality to their existing social nets. The dev payswarm system is already integrated via the wordpress plugin and it’s possible to pay for apps as a proof of concept. More work to be done on this shortly.
MyProfile as also announced the first version of its REST API.
And just for fun I made a little post about how you can webize an simple HTML5 app, “doodle jump“, with just a few lines of code.
Last but not least…
Great work from the team at crypto stick who have created an open source hardware solution to allow secure login via PKI to Outlook, TrueCrypt, Thunderbird, Evolution, GnuPG. As X.509 is now supported, that means it’s possible to log in via a hardware dongle using your WebID. Looking forward to seeing the first demos of this!
The new, and hopefully improved Kickstarter page and video are now up at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
Take a look! Comments welcome. So are donations, likes, tweets, diggs, +1s, re-distribution, blog posts, and any other visibility! And… if you happen to have a large, distributed project coming up – a conference, event, crowd sourcing effort, flash performance, disaster response exercise that just begs for a collaboration support tool – let’s talk!
Hi Folks,
I just launched a Kickstater project that might be of interest. The short form is "smart documents," running in browsers as webapps, that talk to each other via P2P protocols - as a tool for keeping virtual teams and projects "on the same page." Model is browser-resident pages that communicate via a P2P protocol - so seems relevant to this group.
I encourage you to take a look at
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
and if you're so moved, get on board.
A bit more background:
For about 40 years my "thing" has always been the theory and practice of using the Internet to support virtual organizations. I've scratched this itch by working on everything from C2 systems and distributed simulation, to electronic town meetings, online rulemakings, and webmarkets.
I've continued to find that the simplest tools seem to be the most effective - particularly email lists, and various forms of shared/synchronized documents, both on paper (musical scores, theatrical scripts) and electronic (RFCs, linked spreadsheets, military mission orders distributed by email).
This project represents a distillation of a lot of ideas about how to support virtual projects and teams with "smart documents." It started out as some funded work on "smart op orders" that I'm trying to generalize as an open source tools. I'm nominally calling them "smart notebooks" - and the core idea is "keeping people on the same page, across the net."
Think of a composer, writing some music, then handing out pages to orchestra members, then telling people to mark up their pages - then think about writing in a web browser, distributing by email, and linking the pages so markups propagate automatically. Functionally, I've been thinking of the tool as a cross between a DayRunner on steroids, and HyperCard, retooled for groups, running in a browser. No new tools to install, no fancy groupware running in the cloud - just web apps executing locally, email, and a P2P protocol.
If you can help spread the word - by reposting/retweeting/slashdotting/putting and so forth - that would really be helpful. If you know anybody at Wired or Gizmodo, that would also be helpful (seems like coverage by one of those is a really good vehicle to successful Kickstarter funding).
If you have a project coming up that needs tools for supporting a distributed effort - say a large crowdsourcing project, or organizing a large event - I'm looking for scenarios to support - particuarly if you're funded
And there's a 30-day clock running, so sooner is better!
Thank you very much for any support you might offer,
Miles Fidelman
Awesome scenes in July as one of our members opened the Olympic Games. Incredible to see millions of people around the globe paying credit to way the Web has changed everyone’s lives.
Growing pains experienced in two important specs: HTML5 being forked into HTML5 / “HTML Living Standard” and the main editor of OAuth 2.0 resigning, shows the challenges involved with scaling out technologies to massive audience.
The RWW CG experienced it’s busiest month to date, with many interesting discussions (more on that below). RWW is now probably one of the 3 busiest community group at the W3C, so a big thank you for everyone that has contributed to the conversations.
Communications and Outreach
We are very happy to announce joining forces with PeerPoint, which is a blueprint for a vision of the web as a peer to peer space based on sovereign computing:
“To be the true owner of your information and of your computer’s hardware resources, as well as to share these things in any way you want and only with whomever you want. To participate in the Internet free of the middleman, as an autonomous, independent and sovereign individual.”
We look forward to working on standards and apps to help achieve this vision.
Henry story has kindly agreed to organize an unofficial Face to Face meeting at TPAC 2012 in Lyon, France. Perhaps a great chance to get some people together from various community groups and a chance to do some hacking.
The mail list has experienced its biggest volume to date with around 200 messages. Welcome to new joiners, please feel free to join in discussions, start topics, write blogs posts or contribute to our wiki.
Applications
Lots of pieces of the puzzle coming together this month with signed mail over WebID successfully achieved. Also it’s been possible to access user walls from the command line using simple scripts that will repost, for example, tweets from other services to MyProfile.
Excellent work from OpenLink again, with SPARQL endpoints fully access controlled via WebID, demoed. A fantastic dropbox integration allows 5 star linked data to be published with an incredibly low barrier to entry. Perhaps worth pausing to consider the implications of this.
More discussions on delegation, as we are gearing up to link apps and social networks together in a way that is intuitive to users. Perhaps we are at the point where we can create an app store for the Web, and maybe even link in payments via payswarm.
Last but not least…
Spotter’s badge goes to Brad Jones for finding yet another of michael hausenblas’ awesome projects, Turtled – a simple RDF Turtle visualisation tool (with SVG export) launched
w3c-cg/rww
