D-CENT: state of the art - not

There is a new project named D-CENT which receives funding from the
"European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research,
technological development and demonstration" (FP7, predecessor of
Horizon 2020)
http://dcentproject.eu

It officially started on 1st October 2013.

I had a close look at the presentation (15 May 2013):
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/DCENT%20slides.pdf

"D-CENT will promote large-scale adoption of the D-CENT open
specifications, interoperable technology, open data and open APIs"

That sounds good, but what I found then is almost unbelievable.

The project seems to use Elgg as the main software. I will not comment
on that but mention that it by itself is not decentralized. There is a
page about "Ostatus support in elgg": "Last updated 1368 days ago"
http://community.elgg.org/pages/view/503921/ostatus-support-in-elgg

That page itself might be obsolete but it at least indicates that
decentralisation is almost irrelevant for Elgg. I know that there are
several platforms using Elgg with many _registered_ users (which
obviously is not necessarily the same as _active_ users).

But have a look at slide 11. About have of the projects mentioned there
are *dead* since many years.

State of some of the projects:
*Appleseed*: Michael Chisari, the creator of Appleseed, buried his own
project years ago and now points to a comprehensive Wikipedia list of
projects (http://appleseedproject.org/)
*Crabgrass*: no idea, website is down (http://crabgrass.riseuplabs.org/)
*DiSo*: dead since 4 years (http://diso-project.org/)
*OneSocialWeb*: dead since 3 years (http://onesocialweb.org/)
*SMOB*: dead since 3 years (https://github.com/smob/smob)
*SocialRiver*: dead since 3 years (https://twitter.com/socialriver)

These are tombstones of projects which are part of the _history_ of
distributed social media. Some of them _had been_ really innovative in
the past but they have no further relevance today. To present them as
being anyway near the state of the art today is an insult to both the
Federated Social Web community and the creators and participants of
those former projects.

State of specification:
*OStatus*: Even Evan Prodomou, the main creator of OStatus, has stopped
promoting OStatus more than a year ago.
(http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/) And OStatus for good reasons is
not mentioned in the draft W3C Social Interest Group Charter and the
draft W3C Social Web Working Group Charter.

To summarize: I think it is irresponsible to present this as the state
of the art of distributed social web projects and standards.

I am aware that the deadline for submitting proposals for that
CAPS-funding program was already in January 2013, but that is no excuse
to present projects as state of the art which at *that* time already
died several years ago.

And the W3C is an official partner in that project... Harry, can you
please help to improve or replace at least that terrible presentation?

(I also wonder if none of the evaluators noticed those issues...)

Cheers,
Andreas

Received on Saturday, 22 February 2014 10:33:39 UTC