- From: Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 19:17:01 +0200
- To: "public-socbizcg@w3.org" <public-socbizcg@w3.org>
If folks want, I can put it on a wiki for easier editing. However, if
folks don't mind maybe we first just try emailing comments to this
mailing list. I'd like to have comments in next Thursday, or even
Tuesday, if possible.
As soon as I get all the presentations/photos in from workshop, I'll
release an HTML version on the site.
I'd like to have comments in next Thursday, or even Tuesday, if possible.
I will be in Brussels most of next week but can do a meeting next Thursday.
We can then release it either Thursday (19th) or Tuesday (24th).
My main question to the CG is that they do want the evolution to an IG
put as one of the main outputs in the "executive summary"? Right now
it's at the "next stpes" part of the report.
----
Executive Summary
The W3C-OpenSocial Foundation joint workshop on Social Standards: The
Future of Business convened with the goal to formulate a standardization
strategy to make "social" a first-class citizen of the Web. The current
landscape around social applications on the Web is fragmented, holding
back business results. The Open Web Platform, with W3C's royalty-free
patent policy, offer a sound base for moving forward. The workshop,
hosted by AppFusions and sponsored by IBM and the Open Mobile Alliance,
featured two-days of presentations and intense discussions of
challenges, use cases, and potential standardization strategies for
social. The workshop brought together over 70 people from over 50
companies around this theme, ranging from start-ups like Crushpath to
established enterprise social networks like Yammer.
A number of points of consensus emerged:
The OpenSocial Foundation and W3C co-ordinate to establish one or
more new Working Group(s) to create the next version of OpenSocial on
top of the Open Web Platform
The common data-format for social activities should be JSON-based
ActivityStreams, and a new version that supports extensible data formats
be pursued.
As the "back-end" of social sites usually involves loosely coupled
"NoSQL" graph-based data, work on property graphs should be pursued in a
Community Group.
The workshop built a strong alliance between the OpenSocial Foundation
and W3C to make "social" a first-class citizen of the Web. Given the
move to mobile and device-independence (or multi-device dependence),
building a common framework for social Web applications on top of HTML5
is a top priority. Leveraging the complementary strengths of both
organizations can help make social standards a success.
This workshop built on the work of the Social Business Community Group,
in particular the Social Business Jam in 2011 and reports. Previous
workshops on social included the Federated Social Web conference and the
Future of Social Networking Workshop. The W3C feels that thanks to the
work of the Social Business Community Group, critical mass has been
reached within W3C membership to make social standards a full-featured
part of the Open Web Platform.
Meeting minutes for August 7th and August 8th are available online.
The Business Case for Social Standards
Dion Hinchcliffe (Dachis Group) opened the workshop with a keynote
calling social media the largest communication revolution since the Web
itself. The lack of underlying standards to social media stunts
businesses' ability to get in touch with their own users and customers.
Simplicity is key to success with standards for business, Hinchcliffe
said, pointing to the success of RSS over Web Services. With "hundreds
of social networks with over a million users" unable to talk to each
other, the network effect is being lost. Mark Crawford (SAP) then
explained, based on SAP's experience with SuccessFactors, that social
needs to move from personal relationships based on proprietary stacks to
"business" relationships based on standards so that social activities
(learning, internal communities, HR management, supply chains,
onboarding new employees) can be integrated into business processes
rather than lost in the "black hole" of email. Since companies employ
many diverse packages of software across heterogeneous environments,
standards are the way forward. Ed Krebs (Ford) followed by detailing a
reference architecture that showed both how fragmented the current
landscape was and also pointed to the possibilities for a unified
architecture to make it easy for engineers to build enterprise social
networks that can successfully interoperate both within and between
enterprises such as Ford. Storing files in multiple places is not
efficient, and "nuggets of wisdom" are lost that are crucial to the
business. Don Buddenbaum (IBM) presented on how 'social' has to be
embedded where people do their work, with metrics included so businesses
can understand the concrete results of using social. Lloyd Fassett
(Azteria) gave a presentation on how social standards could enable
businesses to move from "pipes to platforms" that enable a business to
make better choices in use-cases such as health-care staffing.
Use-cases
What concrete use-cases could be addressed using social standards? Li
Ding (Memect) provided an analysis suggesting that all use-cases could
be thought in terms of providing an extended memory for a business.
Monica Wilkinson (Crushpath) discussed how standards help start-ups ship
working code faster, saying that her start-up deploys a vast variety of
standards, ranging from de-facto closed work such as the Open Graph
Protocol (Facebook's "Like" Button) to community-driven work like
ActivityStreams. Eric Meeks (University of San Francisco) argued that
Linked Data complements OpenSocial, and demonstrated how it enables
academic social networking. Adam Boyet (Boeing) pointed out how their
custom-built InSite social platform allows "connections everywhere" to
enable both internal and external collaboration and expert-finding for
Boeing, but authentication and federation of identity profiles were
major pain-points in integrating InSite with other products like
Sharepoint. Lastly, Dan Schutzer (FSTC) reminded the audience that
deployment in the financial sector, depended on privacy and security to
protect users, as well as a focus on risk and compliance that are
necessary to deal with anti-fraud and disclosure requirements. A focus
on expert-finding, as well as identifying the right context for
expertise, was heavily discussed. Discussion took place over the
difference between the emergent proposed social platform and traditional
collaboration software, with the key difference being that collaboration
software was focused on pre-existing teams while social software was
meant to help a business discover connections that it might not even
have known existed before -- both between the employees of a business
and between a business and its customers.
Social Standards Architecture
Monica Lam's keynote on "How Mobile Revolutionizes Social" raised the
case that mobile could revolutionize social, as phones are essentially
thin clients to social networks. Lam followed with a demonstration of an
application that let users create their own ad-hoc social networks
without servers based on their phone. As social standards are currently
spread across multiple standards-bodies and grass-roots efforts, how can
we unite them into a coherent "social platform" built on top of the Open
Web Platform? Bryan Sullivan (AT&T) noted that a social architecture
would have to scale globally in a mobile environment, and demonstrated
how the Open Mobile Alliance had already constructed a draft
architecture (SNEW) based on pre-existing work such as OStatus. There
was still much work to be done, such as integration with NFC and
multi-factor authentication, and ActivityStreams templates were needed
to standardize various common workflows. Lastly, user control and
privacy were still major open issues. A mobile social networking could
even increase network efficiencies, and Fabio Mondin (Telecom Italia)
demonstrated how their work with the eCousing project allowed reduced
network usage by, for example, placing social content closer to the
location of the event. To enable these kinds of use-cases, the social
networking architecture needs to be able to communicate with the
networking architecture. Jason Gary (IBM) pointed out how events and
roles need to be embedded in ActivityStreams, but currently profiles do
not support roles despite roles having the ability to be the "killer
app" for social. Discussion over the importance of roles between roles
was brought up. Ashok Malhotra (Oracle) brought up the fact that the
back-end of social networking sites store massive property graphs, a
graph-based data-structure where lists of properties are attached to
each node. Currently the details are different for how each vendor
stores property graphs, and Oracle would be willing to make a submission
to the W3C to start work in standardizing them. It is currently unclear
how much of property graphs could be handled by the RDF data model.
Federating the Social Web
Matt Franklin (W20 Digital) started with a call to action on how a new
generation of standards to federate the social web, building on top of
OpenSocial and ActivityStreams, would be necessary. In particular,
OpenSocial does not address identity and the social graph, and
ActivityStreams needs to have better interoperability with processing
rules and levels of visibility. Given that the proposed next version of
ActivityStreams is using the JSON-LD format, Gregg Kellogg presented on
how JSON-LD adds URIs and links to JSON, thus making JSON compatible
with the RDF data model. Ed Krebs (Ford) presented that any federated
architecture needs to have a "PubSubHub" system are needed such that new
business systems can feed data to each other without changing the other
servers. Sam Goto (Google) presented on how schema.org was being
extended to take on actions (essentially a taxonomy of verbs), similar
to the "Embedded Experiences" of OpenSocial where verbs can take on
well-defined subjects and objects with semantic roles. Theodoros
Michalareas (VELTI) presented on the OPENi API, which after reviewing
over 140 APIs to produced, using principles of privacy-by-design, an API
for federated identities and app-produced contexts. There was
considerable discussion over the choice of data-formats (HTML with
Microformats2, JSON-LD, ordinary JSON) as well as the relationship of
context to security concerns.
Next Steps for OpenSocial
OpenSocial is the foremost API for enterprise social applications, and
its evolution will help drive the open social web. In the OpenSocial
"State of the Union" address, Mark Weitzel (Jive) and Andy Smith (IBM)
laid out a plan for building the next version of OpenSocial on top of
the Open Web Platform. OpenSocial has always been focused on securely
sharing context bi-directionally with applications. A new version of
OpenSocial that builds on top of Shadow DOM and Web Components will let
developers build OpenSocial applications in the same style as any other
HTML5 application while maintaining OpenSocial's ability to share
context and create "embedded experience" that prevent users from losing
their context. Building on their points, Beth Lavender (MITRE) discussed
how their work allowed MITRE to view a business either at a particular
point in time or view the business as activities were occurring in
"real-time." The host of the workshop, Ellen Feaheny (AppFusions),
discussed how AppFusions makes standards like OAuth talk to each other
in their rapid integration of Jive, IBM, and Atlassian applications.
Shane Caraveo (Mozilla) presented Mozilla's new "Social API" that embeds
capabilities to the user agent's sidebar such as notifications, social
bookmarking, share, and chat windows. Dimitri Glazkov (Google) then gave
an in-depth presentation on Web Components, which led to considerable
excitement on how OpenSocial could work together with Web Components and
other new capabilities being developed in HTML5.
Running Code
Inspired by the "IndieWeb Camps" and "Federated Social Web Summits", the
workshop hosted a session of demonstrations of running code. Tantek
Celik began by introducing the idea of "IndieWeb", based on the twin
principles of Own your own data, Eat your own dogfood, and Publish Own
Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Aaron Pareki showed how by running his own
domain he could be his own identity server (IndieAuth), and then with
Bret Comnes a demonstration was done showing how a watch could be used
to authenticate into a site @@. Evan Prodromou (Status.Net) presented
his new "Pump.io" codebase for an ActivityStreams server with varying
degrees of privacy, allowing streams to be filtered and writable only to
certain groups. Ben Werdmueller (Lakatoo) presented Idno, a social
publishing platform built just on top of HTML5 and microformats. Users
should be put first, and beware of putting technology before usability.
Patrick Deegan (ID3) demonstrated Open Mustard Seed that uses virtual
machines to created trusted applications bundles. Their goal is to
create a new social ecosystem of trusted digital institutions based on
personal data. Access control (distribution control of ActivityStreams)
and consumption of ActivityStreams were mentioned as outstanding
problems, with a client API for ActivityStreams and WebMention brought
up as possible solutions.
Next Steps
At the end of the workshop, break-out groups met to discuss areas to be
standardized next. Groups formed around the following topics:
OpenSocial and Gadgets will focus on radical simplification
leveraging HTML5, moving from the XML definition of a gadget to a
situation where AJAX requests are performed directly against a page. How
context works with cross-origin requests and how application tags can be
supported by HTML5 are the next steps.
ActivityStreams will focus on a new version, ActivityStreams 2.0,
to increase extensibility and handle state. There was a large discussion
over the role of JSON-LD as a syntax for ActivityStreams, but as
ActivityStreams 2.0 does not depend on it, it was viewed as acceptable.
Identity and Profile Federation needs to focus on a set of core
attributes that show how previous work in the area (vCard, Microformats,
PortableContacts) can be extended with desired features such as
skill-levels and certifications. How profiles federate using protocols
such as Pubsubhubbub is necessary to understand.
IndieWeb will focus on user experience, in particular making it
much easier to use the reply button and work with browsers to make it
easier to share content.
Property Graphs need to have their data model defined, as well as
APIs and schemas. Potential cross-over work on exploiting property
graphs with the OpenSocial API should be investigated.
Linked Data and vocabularies need to focus on how to create new
kinds of vocabularies that can enable social business, such as expertise
vocabularies. R.V. Guha (Google) came to answer questions about
licensing and transparency. Guha noted that data a company marks up
using schema.org microdata still belongs to the website, and so that
data cannot be re-used without that website's permission, but that he
would investigate whether changes to the schema.org terms of use were
warranted.
Interest in following through with each of above topics was fairly well
distributed, with more than ten people interested in continuing concrete
work on each. The idea of a high-level "Social Business Architecture"
document showing how all the diverse pieces could be put together in a
use-case driven architecture also attracted significant interest. New
working groups on ActivityStreams, OpenSocial, and possibly federation
should be pursued. Property Graphs and Profile work should happen in
Community Groups in order to reach more maturity. Schema.org would
continue to work with W3C and other grassroots communities to make its
process more open and transparent for vocabularies. The Social Business
Community Group would evolve to handle messaging and co-ordination
responsibilities as an Interest Group.
All participants are invited to join the Social Business Community Group
in order to help draft the charters for new work. Even if you missed the
workshop, you can join the conversation to build the next version of
social on top of the Web!
Received on Thursday, 12 September 2013 17:17:09 UTC