Day 3 at TPAC: Halloween

Wednesday was designed in the spirit of an un conference. There was a big shuffle as people wrote up their conference tracks and pasted it onto a big board. As it happened we ended up getting two sessions following each other in the same room, it turned out to be a very large room for 50 people that was more than full.

1. Social

 There was a very long introduction of everyone around the table, where it was clear that
issues of distributed social networks as well as identity and privacy were high on the agenda 
of many people from many different very large corporations. There was a strong presence from the 
Linked Data Platform community in semantic interoperability.

The minutes here:
     http://www.w3.org/2012/10/31-social-minutes.html


2. Identity and Privacy

  This is the track I proposed. It was after lunch and again the room was full. So I introduced the topic by talking shortly about our definition of what a WebID was: a URL denoting a person, and the importance of distributed identity to the web. I put up TimBL's picture he drew on Tuesday describing the relation of WebID, OpenID, OAuth, etc...
   
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webid/2012Oct/0265.html

Eric Rescorla spoke on his IETF work on WebRTC.
Mike Jones of OpenId gave a quick talk on OpenID.
David at Mozilla demoed the Javascript Crypto API
hta, suggested that URIs as identifiers is fine, but one should not dereference
them, which brought TimBL in.

   http://www.w3.org/2012/10/31-identity-minutes.html

I did a very quick demo of WebID to make the point that this does not require
the user to remember any URI at all. Just as users don't need to remember 
URLs when clicking on links: the Link is hidden, the text is underlined. So
I clicked on the WebID box on http://my-profile.eu/ and a simple selection box
appeared ( on Chrome ) and I just needed to do a point and click operation to 
select it.

( for people not present you can get a demo in the video on the page: http://webid.info/ )
	
 I then quickly talked about how with Linked Data one can create an institutional Web of Trust [1], in order to increase trust in commerce, banking and on the web all round.
 
  We then had a quick and informal show of hands on interest in standardising WebID.

Henry

[1] I go into this in a lot more detail here:
    http://bblfish.net/blog/2012/04/30/


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/