RE: Draft Final Report

More detailed comments to follow, but the attached changes are intended to
try and help reflect the conversation in the last CG meeting around the
final disposition of the CG, as reflected in the meeting minutes -
http://www.w3.org/community/socbizcg/meeting-minutes/

My understanding was that there was consensus that we wanted the CG
recognized for having delivered on it's mission of defining next steps for
W3C social business activity via a workshop; as well as, a recognition that
this transition to focusing on the workshop recommendations provided a good
opportunity for correcting certain aspects of how the CG operated that were
less then optimal.  (like the loose charter and time frames, especially
since none of the recommendations explicitly targeted or aligned with the
CGs existing mission.)

I think the consensus is we wanted to explicitly establish a hierarchy of
new community/workgroups for the recommendations and establish an interest
group to carry on the communication and coordination role that the CG
played by default.  Primary because the IG would mainstream that role
within W3C process; where as, CGs are outside of W3C process, and we want
to adequately reflect the position that the recommendation of making "
social standards a full-featured part of the Open Web Platform"

Finally,  it would be better to use the new IG to help organize the new
efforts since the IG is the vehicle we will have moving forward, so I
updated the document to reflect that position.

(See attached file: Social Business Workshop report draft v1-6.docx)

Regards,


Don Buddenbaum, STSM, FLMI, Chair W3C SBCG
Emerging Social Business Software Standards
IBM Software Group, Strategy
919.543.0346 t/l 441.0346 buddenba@us.ibm.com
SBCG: http://www.w3.org/community/socbizcg/



From:	"Bassetti, Ann" <ann.bassetti@boeing.com>
To:	Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org>, "public-socbizcg@w3.org"
            <public-socbizcg@w3.org>,
Cc:	"Boyet, Adam C" <adam.c.boyet@boeing.com>, "Bryant, Mark"
            <mark.bryant@boeing.com>
Date:	09/12/2013 05:30 PM
Subject:	RE: Draft Final Report



Hello All --

I took the liberty of copying the text from below, pasted into a Word
document, and added a bunch of formatting.  Further I suggest some modest
edits, which you can see if you look at "Final Showing Markup" in the Word
doc, or look at the attached PDF.

To make it more legible, I did not turn on tracking until I was done with
formatting. Presumably the bolding and sections will be easy to see.

(I could also send this in Open Office format if needed, but don't have
that tool on this particular computer.)

Sorry that I did not post this to the wiki, but I am running out the
door...

These are just my suggestions; feel free to kibbitz or change anything!
Very nice job summarizing, Harry.

  -- Ann




-----Original Message-----
From: Harry Halpin [mailto:hhalpin@w3.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:17 AM
To: public-socbizcg@w3.org
Subject: Draft Final Report

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!



(See attached file: Social Business Workshop report draft v1-5.pdf)(See
attached file: Social Business Workshop report draft v1-5.docx)