Re: User stories for Social API

On 02/10/2015 12:07 PM, Daniel Harris wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I'm not in the SocialWG so I'll make my comments here regarding the discussion that took place at:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/2015Feb/thread.html#msg18
> 
> As I see it... At one end we have social silos – all people pointing their social clients at the same organisation/server. At the other end we have pure distributed systems (P2P) where people have their clients connecting directly to other clients belonging to other people – note that there are no social silos or social organisations or even social servers involved – a little bit like real life. Somewhere in between these polls is a federated social system where social organisations interconnect their social servers enabling people to interconnect, even though they may not be using the same social server. However, surely the protocol we create needs to work with all these scenarios? From the outset our terminology and philosophy must be such that this is one system and one protocol even though it may comprise of many different parts and scenarios and get built in stages.
> 
> For example, I want to be able to friend Pavlik directly – client to client – device to device. Now some may scoff at building in pure P2P but it's already out there, so shouldn't we be modelling and catering for this scenario too? If you do want to get into architecture then pure P2P could be just be another instance of a federated system where my device has both a web client (for the UI) and web server builtin and each device talks to each other device server to server.
> 
> The issue about the users being in single organisation or from different organisations is a misnomer. In my beautiful world there are no organisations per se. We are all individuals in permanent freelance. We interact with each other on projects (big and small – long and short). We create products/IPR with others on an ongoing/dynamic basis. Take a look at value networks ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_network ). Is it really going to work (be successful) if we build a single server implementation of the Social API and don't take into account all the issues associated with a multi server (a pure P2P) scenario.
> 
> It just feel like we should be doing some high level modelling before we get down to the nitty gritty – sorry if this has already been done, can someone point me to it? And that means being totally abstracted away from any technological constraints. Without this 'context' document to work from, I can see how easy it is for interactions/misunderstandings, such as what happened on Feb 4th on the WG list, to take place.
> 
> By the way – and importantly – it doesn't mean we have to implement everything in a 'blue sky'/'context' document in phase one of the protocol. But what it does mean is that we are, at least, aware of the bigger picture.
> 
> This process needs to be staged and I'm concerned that there doesn't seem to be clear stages stated at the outset. Or, if there are clear stages stated, then they don't seem to be being followed. Stage one should just be list user stories in order of input – with no ranking or categorisation needed. Each author should be attached to each user story. Then, once this has been done, all the authors should have a call and talk (yes, I mean *talk*) through where user stories: can be combined (in which case both authors can be listed on one story (if needs be)); can be modified to better suit the needs of the social web; can be categorised into areas of interest/technology.
> 
> I really don't understand why this is being rushed through in a week after years of work in various groups. Seems like a recipe to start a fire and I'd like to suggest everyone does everything they can to cool the situation off and take stock.
> 
> Just my 140 quid's worth!

Note that the 'high-level modelling, then write user stories and
discuss' path was tried years ago and tends to lead, in this domain, to
an infinite number of user stories with little or no visible progress on
running code or progress. The WG is supposed to deliver standards with
code.

See here:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/

There has been large amounts of work done in the space, including
hundreds of user stories:

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/UserStories

Yet not as much progress as we'd like in the last five years.

However, the IG does not have to be as tightly focussed on deliverables
and continue going down the path you suggest.

    cheers,
       harry

> 
> Cheers Daniel
>

Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2015 15:12:51 UTC