Re: Stepping down

Hi,

Sure. I write here as a spokeperson of the developing team we have build in
these years with GSOC to present some general guidelines-related questions
(if this is TL;DR for somebody, you can jump directly to the "Questions"
paragraphs at the end).

I believe the wish for everybody is to move on the draft to be successfully
approved in the years to come. To make this possible, one of the needed
requirement is for a relevant global community of developers to back Hydra
usage as current practice in different (enterprise or Open Sources)
codebases (see what happened with GraphQL or OpenAPI, even with different
governance models and ways of attracting interest from developers). In one
of previous discussions (State of Hydra thread), I tried to outline what is
the scenario we may want to reach to  give Hydra the critical mass to
become a standard, I briefly repeat here for convenience:

"""
The draft can become a standard only with wide industry adoption. I think
that we are talking of a perspective of at least ~5-10 years, if we build
the right packages for the most popular languages in the next few years. I
suppose that the target is making Hydra become a standard for ~10-20% of
the installations around. Considering the current adoption and the public
tools available, we are still in an early phase, that is not so bad
considering the time span that Hydra should target. There are two possible
routes, both worthy: make vocabulary developers add Hydra to their spectrum
of tools; but also facilitate at most the use of Hydra for newly published
datasets that can link to existing ones. Hydra Ecosystem focuses on this
second option.
"""

This requires a long-term effort in terms of community-building. That is
why I asked Markus in 2017 if he thought was a good idea to participate in
Google Summer Of Code and we started this adventure that has been growing
consistently in the last two years (now we are looking ahead to apply for
the third year; we started with 2 students and we now have 20+
contributors, for the first time this year we presented at a major event;
developers that hardly would have ever get in touch with Hydra, now know
the technology).
From a developer point of view Hydra is an high peak to reach in terms of
skills required to create a vocabulary and to deploy a client-server
infrastructure. Thanks to GSOC we can let tenths of developers to acquire
the skills to use Hydra in the future; equally important is for the specs
to test themselves in the wild, with real-world usage patterns in cloud
environments. We believe that this is of great benefit for Linked Data and
to bring the values of W3C to younger generations.

Mentors can keep up with this responsibility, if we decide that this
activity has to be independent from the activity of the CG; instead if you
think that the effort has to be guided by the CG (because in our opinion is
strictly entangled with the life-cycle of the standard), we have to
establish a minimal governance model to make Hydra recognizable as a player
in the Open Source development landscape. This implies a strategy in
acquiring sources of backing (like GSOC or any other institution that
support OS or the usage of Hydra; having a list of peers would be a good
starting point) to ensure a steady growth.

***Questions***

At the moment we have had distinct entities (the specs designers and the
GSOC initiative plus everybody else working on their own projects); GSOC
mentors can be the transmission chain to beginners. What we see from our
point of view, we possibly need somehow to engineer a transition from (or a
proper spin-off from) Community Group to Open Source organisation in the
next years to make possible delivering the draft to a standard. Is the
intention of the CG to participate/lead somehow in this kind of enterprise
or this is left completely to the initiative of groups of singles? I admit
my ignorance about W3C standards life-cycles so to ask: how can the draft
practically move on without a proper OS organisation? How can we gather
consensus to become a standard otherwise?

What is needed to re-ensure contributors and adopters is to clarify
objectives and conduct, and a timeline. Engineering the specs is a
fundamental component but we need some other components (like the
implementation side that implies facilitating adoption and  recognition
among peers, presence at events, etc) also in place to be a sound
alternative as an hypermedia REST documentation framework and reach
approval. Is all of this or part of it in the agenda?

Best,

On Sat, 5 Jan 2019 at 20:43, Karol Szczepański <karol.szczepanski@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Lorenzo
>
> --Please Karol let us know in the next weeks the role you have in mind
> for the effort
> --we are keeping up with Google Summer Of Code for creating a strong
> global community for
> --Hydra API developers: objectives, timeline, organisational structure
>
> Could you please elaborate more? In general I'm only aware of GSOC
> existance, but I didn't participate in any way.
> While I have some vision and plan for Hydra itself, I didn't think
> about these for GSOC
>
> Karol
>
> sob., 5 sty 2019 o 14:40 Lorenzo Moriondo <tunedconsulting@gmail.com>
> napisał(a):
> >
> > Thanks truly Markus for all your time dedicated in these years and your
> inputs and ideas as Chairman!
> >
> > Please Karol let us know in the next weeks the role you have in mind for
> the effort we are keeping up with Google Summer Of Code for creating a
> strong global community for Hydra API developers: objectives, timeline,
> organisational structure. This is relevant as the 2019 GSOC Organisations
> are meant to apply before the end of January. If you need it we can provide
> a brief report of the activities carried on since 2017.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > On Fri, 4 Jan 2019 at 23:42, Ruben Verborgh (UGent-imec) <
> Ruben.Verborgh@ugent.be> wrote:
> >>
> >> Dear Markus,
> >>
> >> Thanks for all you’ve done. It’s been great.
> >> You will be missed.
> >>
> >> The Hydra ideas are still great and necessary for today’s Web.
> >> Let’s make them happen.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> Ruben
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > ¤ acM ¤
> > Lorenzo
> > Moriondo
> > @lorenzogotuned
> > https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzomoriondo
> > https://github.com/Mec-iS
>


-- 
¤ acM ¤
Lorenzo
Moriondo
@lorenzogotuned
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzomoriondo
https://github.com/Mec-iS