Re: D-CENT: state of the art - not

On 02/22/2014 11:33 AM, Andreas Kuckartz wrote:
> 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

Quick note - as you may know, there is over a year in the between 
project proposal writing (in 2012) and the project review/begin date 
(2013). W3C will make sure DCENT is up to speed on standards, with Neo 
doing implementation work. Neo is a lean development firm, so we haven't 
made any choices architecturally yet, as we're interviewing users and 
figuring out their needs before jumping on board with any protocols.

Deliverables will of course be sent to the list, but the good news is 
that we should have at least one maintained open-source





>
> 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?

Andreas - also, there has been exceedingly little work in the field 
actually since 2012, so I think your use of the term "irresponsible" is 
irresponsible :) Regardless, the only open-source I've seen some 
progress as regards interop testing was OStatus. The IndieWeb work is 
making some progess now around WebMention, which is great, so I imagine 
folks will switch to that.

The presentation was made by NESTA myself, who have very little 
technical knowledge of the details, as they do the admin work.


>
> (I also wonder if none of the evaluators noticed those issues...)
>
> Cheers,
> Andreas
>

Received on Sunday, 23 February 2014 14:42:28 UTC