RE: Hydra Status

Very interesting discussion folks. To briefly summarize it, the main points that came up in the discussions in the last days was a demand for more examples, tutorials, and comparisons to related efforts and a desire to move discussions from the mailing list to GitHub. Last but not least, a reexamination of the overall architecture came up.

I have a slightly different perspective on this... and also a different focus. IMO we are not at the stage yet were we should be concerned about adoption. I thus don't see work on examples, tutorials, comparisons etc. as a high priority yet. They are certainly useful in evaluating designs etc. but they require lots of work and hour resources are better spent elsewhere at the moment IMO. Keep in mind that till the spec is stable the cost for creating up to date examples is much much higher. We also don't seem to have problems attracting people, Hydra is among the 10 biggest W3C Community Groups and at least mentioned in almost every serious API discussion. That being said, if someone wants to work on this, I'll do whatever I can to support it and give it the right visibility.

What I think we are sorely missing at the moment, is a group of *dedicated and committed* core contributors that push the development of Hydra forward. And by this I don't only mean taking the time to deeply think about designs etc. What's probably more important is that (at least) core contributors get familiar with the underlying technologies. Hydra is built on JSON-LD which in turn is based on RDF's data model. It is supposed to work well with HTTP and other web technologies. I have been trying to be as welcoming as possible to onboard people not familiar with those technologies. I have explained very basic stuff over and over again. Maybe that was counterproductive in hindsight as it sidetracked lots of discussions. Looking back, I also realize that we had lots of great discussions but only very few concrete proposals have been made. Unfortunately I have no solution to all of this so I would like to hear your thoughts on these topics.

To address the other two items I mentioned at the beginning of this mail... I'm open to move the discussions to GitHub as an experiment, but we need to somehow export and properly archive the discussions we have there. This is very important from a standardization point of view. Likely other WG/CG have already built some solutions for that in the meantime (back in the JSON-LD days there was nothing readily available). We can also revisit Hydra's overall architecture but I'm a bit skeptical about such an effort if we can't reach consensus on something as fundamental as collections.


I hope this mail doesn't come across as too negative. I think we have some of the smartest people in this space in the Community Group and many on the list are very passionate about Hydra. Let's use the energy to efficiently drive Hydra forward.


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Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 15 November 2016 20:54:27 UTC