Re: Draft Final Report

On 16 September 2013 17:49, James M Snell <jasnell@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Thanks for the clarification!  Good to see you are following this list, I
find the evolution of Activity Streams in the last year very promising...


>
> - James Snell
>   jasnell@us.ibm.com
>   (559) 707-6331 (mobile)
>
> [image: Inactive hide details for Melvin Carvalho ---2013/09/14 09:45:04
> AM---On 14 September 2013 18:29, Crawford, Mark <mark.crawford]Melvin
> Carvalho ---2013/09/14 09:45:04 AM---On 14 September 2013 18:29, Crawford,
> Mark <mark.crawford@sap.com> wrote: >  Harry et. al.,****
>
> 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
> ------------------------------
>
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> On 14 September 2013 18:29, Crawford, Mark <*mark.crawford@sap.com*<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*<melvincarvalho@gmail.com>]
>    *
>    Sent:* Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:18 PM*
>    To:* Harry Halpin*
>    Cc:* *public-socbizcg@w3.org* <public-socbizcg@w3.org>*
>    Subject:* Re: Draft Final Report
>
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>    On 12 September 2013 19:17, Harry Halpin <*hhalpin@w3.org*<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* <http://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* <http://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* <http://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! :)
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