A Quick Note on WebID history

> On 10. Aug 2021, at 20:43, bergi <bergi@axolotlfarm.org> wrote:
> 
> Am 10.08.21 um 14:37 schrieb Henry Story:
>>> On 10. Aug 2021, at 13:29, bergi <bergi@axolotlfarm.org> wrote:
>>> Am 10.08.21 um 07:29 schrieb Henry Story:
>>>>> On 10. Aug 2021, at 00:52, bergi <bergi@axolotlfarm.org> wrote:
>>>>> Am 09.08.21 um 18:32 schrieb Henry Story:
>>>>>>> On 9. Aug 2021, at 17:34, bergi <bergi@axolotlfarm.org> wrote:
>>>>>>> Am 27.07.21 um 20:07 schrieb Melvin Carvalho:
>>>>>>>> I'm hearing that you dont have time/resources to take WebID
>>>>>>>> any further So, would you step down as chair of the the WebID
>>>>>>>> community group at let others, perhaps a community effort, to
>>>>>>>> modernize it
>>>>>>> I strongly support that. Not leaving any comment on a proposal
>>>>>>> like that is even more an argument to look for another chair
>>>>>>> who can contribute more time for the group.
>>>> Btw. what is the proposal that is being talked about?
>>> 
>>> The proposal is that you step down as a chair.
>> Ah so your problem was that I did not leave a comment on a proposal
>> on a different mailing list to remove me as a chair? And that
>> is a reason to step down?
> 
> Ignoring the other arguments makes them disappear? But ok, I expect a chair to moderate the group and encourage people to participate. You participated in the discussion on the RWW mailing list, and you brought up the lack of time you can spend on the chair role, and you were personally listed as a recipient on the mentioned mail. You can't encourage people with the absence of the chair.

I happened to notice a thread in the rww mailing entitled ”A quick note on WebID history”.
The story that had been told of WebID history seemed very partial, and far from the 
truth, so I wrote a response:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2021Jul/0012.html

I hope you’ll agree that it was written in a positive tone.

> 
>>>> and that is why we opened a github repository to make just such changes. You can even leave issues there.
>>> 
>>> It's not about what I want to change. It's about why should one
>>> contribute to the WebID group if:
>>> 
>>> - the chair has no time to fulfill the role as chair
>>> - the chair claims there is nothing to do
>> It is about what it makes sense to change. If you have no
>> real change proposals then what is the fuss about?
> 
> I hoped you would have insight after reading my last mail. Since it doesn't seem to be the case, let me be more clear: You were never able to distinguish between your role as member and chair. You treated WebID like your personal project.

In early 2008, Bruno Harbulot, Toby Inkster and a few others, we discovered the possibility of 
WebID in an e-mail discussion spanning various forums. 
I wrote a blog post on the findings that is still archived here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090306211116/http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_ssl_creating_a_global

We wrote a much cited paper ”foaf+TLS: RESTful Authentication for the Social Web” in 2009 and
at least a handful of papers after that. 

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/FOAF%2BTLS%3A-RESTful-Authentication-for-the-Social-Web-Story-Harbulot/2a7e3b236a7b48213dcf9e906bef84c9baf147ab

We created a foaf+protocols mailing list and we then got the possibility of developing this
as part of an Incubator Group, where we developed most of the specs that exist now.

This XG lasted much longer than it should have really. Sun got eaten by Oracle
and I lost my job there, so I was self financing. 
In the end we produced the documents at https://webid.info/spec/

I spent a huge amount of time traveling around Europe, giving talks at universities on
the subject and explaining the importance of the decentralised web, even as early as 2010.
I gave a talk on the subject at the first philosophy of the web conference for example
as you can see from the slides here:

https://www.slideshare.net/PhiloWeb/philo-web-2010henrystory

> Anyone who disagreed with you was, from your point of view, wrong.

Not at all! I hope you will allow me to disagree with you :-)
Here are two examples:

 There was a TPAC call on operating the WebID spec from WebID-TLS which 
I was not too keen on, as it meant writing another spec, where I hoped we’d soon be
finished. There was a vote on it and we did the second WebID definition.

There was a vote on Hash URLs and 303 and I supported keeping things simple and efficient
with hash urls, as Tim Berners-Lee would have preferred, and I lost, so we allowed both.

The protocol was very very simple, so in a way there was not much more
than what we wrote after our first definition. 

After that what was important was 
1) getting read/write web to work - I worked on the W3C LDP spec and implemented it
2) working on access control + LDP = Solid, writing clients, etc.. That somehow led me to 
   work on a PhD.

 WebID is only a small piece in the overall aim of a decentralised social web
that we are all aiming for. There were quite a few pieces worked on in other forums.

> Melvin framed it maybe too friendly in this [1] mail how you behaved to Manu Sporny. 

 I don’t have a disagreement with Manu Sporny, as I explained in detail in the reply to
the RWW email above.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2021Jul/0012.html

There was a big difference in direction between where Manu was going and WebID.
Essentially we had WebID working in 2008 already, and we just wanted to specify it.
Manu’s work on the other hand was much longer term. Indeed it is kind of only starting to
come together now, with verifiable credentials and DIDs, and there is still more more work 
to be done.

WebID allowed us to get working immediately and start demonstrate how to build decentralised
social networks.

There was a problem at some point that we had Manu Sporny as Author of the WebId-TLS spec,
when he really only contributed a bit editorially a few years earlier when we thought we could
be going down the same route. Note that I was the last to attend those teleconferences with him
in those early days.

So we moved him to the contributors section. 
That is just as I am listed as a contributor to the Signing HTTP Messages spec from the IETF
where Manu Sporny is the author.

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-message-signatures-05.html

I actually really like that spec a lot, as it is simple, minimalistic and 
relatively easy to implement.  (I wrote it up mostly in 2 to 3 weeks in Scala,
if you are interested)

> Multiple people left the group after not being able to discuss things with you.
> Once in a WebID call, someone described your behavior as a dictator instead of a chair. I agree with that.

Melvin has an axe to grind with the Solid community, it seems, after
he closed down some domain with a large number of WebIDs last
year. 

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-solid/2020Oct/0020.html

I don’t really know the details of the story, or how it came to that,
as I spent the past 5 years working on a PhD on Solid,
build up the mathematical foundations for that.

Perhaps you should be careful about taking what Melvin writes as the truth, 
and keep in mind that he may not have the best intentions when presenting
the history of WebID or Solid. I don’t know why...

> So how do you want to moderate the group and encourage people to participate when
> 
> - you don't have time
> - people have to rely on your goodwill
> 
> Stepping down is the only option if you want contributions beyond an echo chamber.
> Otherwise, we should mark the group as abandoned as proposed in this [2] mail, or as I would call it: Taken hostage.

There is no hostage taking if there is no proposal for improvements 
that I am trying to block. I hope you can see that the claim is 
ludicrous. Even more so as I opened the repo with Sarven
to help make the improvements that were pointed out to me.

Henry

> 
> [1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2021Jul/0011.html
> [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2021Jul/0054.html



https://co-operating.systems
WhatsApp, Signal, Tel: +33 6 38 32 69 84‬ 
Twitter: @bblfish

Received on Tuesday, 10 August 2021 20:40:58 UTC