Re: Draft Final Report

There is no formal IETF activity around Activity Streams. The spec had been
submitted to the "Independent Track" with the goal of having a stable
reference. That means there's really nothing to coordinate with the IETF
about. I know there are some folks there who are interested in this work
and would likely follow it closely, but that's about it.

- James Snell
   jasnell@us.ibm.com
   (559) 707-6331 (mobile)



From: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
To: "Crawford, Mark" <mark.crawford@sap.com>
Cc: "public-socbizcg@w3.org" <public-socbizcg@w3.org>
Date: 2013/09/14 09:45 AM
Subject: Re: Draft Final Report






On 14 September 2013 18:29, Crawford, Mark <mark.crawford@sap.com> wrote:
  Harry et. al.,





  I have taken the liberty of using Anne’s word version to provide
  corrections, edits, and what I believe to be content improvements.



[[

JSON-based ActivityStreams should be the common data-format for social
activities, with the pursuit of a new version that supports extensible data
formats necessary moving forward.

]]

I think this is a good goal, however Activity Streams is still a work in
progress at the IETF, rather than, the W3C.  There would need to be some co
ordination I think, which is perhaps what is being suggested here.

The social web will always be too big to have a single messaging format
that everyone will use.  But it could be a goal to have systems support *at
least one* common format, such as activity streams



  Kind Regards,


  Mark











  From: Melvin Carvalho [mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:18 PM
  To: Harry Halpin
  Cc: public-socbizcg@w3.org
  Subject: 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.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!





  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! :)