Re: does the CCG have any thoughts about possible changes to W3C itself?

On Sat, Apr 9, 2022 at 3:45 PM Daniel Hardman <daniel.hardman@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I read this article and thought it raised interesting questions. Perhaps
> those who've been doing W3C stuff the deepest and longest can opine a bit?
>
>
> https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/the-w3c-is-at-a-crossroads-for-the-web-and-itself-with-mit-exiting-as-admin-and-disarray-on-all-fronts/
>

Thanks for sharing, I wasnt following this closely, but interesting info,
including Manu's commentary

I can say that for about 10 years I worked closely with the w3c director at
MIT, including weekly calls for years, as we created the Solid project

I think that went quite well, though perhaps not as quickly as some would
have liked, and getting funding is always a challenge

I think during those years it was a nice ethical team, with Eric, Amy and
others helping, and Timbl as MIT professor and his students encouraged to
work on Solid

The idea was to complete the web project and standards with respect to an
access controlled, read-write space, leading to a web operating system.  I
dont think we quite got that over the line, unfortunately.

Then a few years back, Timbl decided to go the business route, including
with VCs.  With that came a different style of work, and he left MIT on
sabbatical, and Im unsure he'll go back

This kind of left the MIT/W3C/Director aspect in a kind of new situation.
I havent followed it closely of late.  I dont know the mind of the director
now, though I did have a quite long call with him a while back, and we
largely discussed Solid and what still needed fixing

In general, knowing the director pretty well, he tends not to get involved
with stuff, unless he thinks its a battle worth fighting.  And I suspect he
has his hands full with business related things

If the W3C is going to break with MIT, I think that's a major thing, not
least in terms of philosophy.  It started with a strong emphasis on royalty
free standards, which kind of reminded me of the ethos of free software.  I
hope that can continue, but it may not

As for what happens next, we'll have to wait and see.  I do think it's
going to be the big browser manufacturers, app stores, well adopted APIs,
that shape the web, for better or worse.

Aside: I would still like to see timbl's vision of a web operating system
completed.  I have all the blueprints in my head.  It's just a challenge to
roll things out and gain traction without getting side tracked.  Some of
the standards created to that end I think have room for improvement.
Including the semantic web standards, which underpin DID and VCs.  Manu's
old post about the limitations of the semantic web still have a lot of
merit.  I do think if we'd standardized on JSON w/ URIs, instead of "URIs
everywhere" we'd have been 10 years further ahead than we are now.  The
semantic web is extremely difficult to deploy to production, but could be
simplified.  The idea of human and machine agents working together never
really happened (aka "where are all the agents").  The stack has technical
debt abound (eg having to support specs from 20 years ago) and leaky
abstractions (eg tying data to transport).  I'm unsure this can now really
be completed at the w3c, but the w3c has hopefully provided some of the
tools, that if cherry picked in the right way, can lead to Turing Complete
web operating system, operating in the interests of its users.  This would
be a very differently structured web than what we see today