Re: Draft Final Report

On 12 September 2013 19:17, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>

+1

There is IMHO a need to allow both users and apps to access back end
services in a privacy oriented way.  This would be a great thing to have a
standard solution for.


>     The common data-format for social activities should be JSON-based
> ActivityStreams, and a new version that supports extensible data formats be
> pursued.
>

+1

Activity Streams "2.0" is already extensible and looks very promising


>     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.
>

I'm unsure what NoSQL means, the best definition I know is "Not SQL".  Such
that key/value pairs can be associated with an entity seems to be the
common ground on how to do data, so I suppose that's what this means.  A
slight question about lists is whether they are ordered or not.  For
example linked data by default is unordered, but, for example, JRD links
are ordered.  I think it's something that can become well established going
forward ...

+1 in general


>
> 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.orgmicrodata 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!
>

Great work Harry.

I'll just quote from Tim's book, "Weaving The Web" -- "The Web is more a
social invention than a technical one" -- let's try and realize the dream!
:)