Strategy for better collaboration within the group and with other groups

Hello,

I would like to share my concern about current state of our
collaboration, more precisely I can of course only talk about my
impression of it. I would also like to propose dedicating this issue a
small share of our time, preferably during next teleconf, IMO the sooner
we address it the less chance we leave for upsetting tensions later down
the road.

First of all I see very little engagement from IndieWeb community on
mailing list and in github issues. I find big respect to IW folks
accomplishments in the field we work with and believe that they can
contribute a lot to the work in this group. AFAIK mailing lists have bad
reputation among IW participants and IRC has general preference. I hope
we can all at least use github issues and then improve bridge between
IRC and mailing list. I plan to get my proper IRC setup running soon and
could help with some part of such bridging. Two examples where we could
find tensions later on if we miss early communication:

* AS basic schema / schema.org / microformats / other vocabs - at this
moment microformats stay listed in various places on our wiki but almost
not present in our recent discussions. I remember Tantek mentioning
something about interop between AS and microformats when giving +1 to
AS2.0 going FPWD
* ActivityPump federation and WebMention - great to see fresh proposal
from Owen but I think we should at least have the federated
notifications part of it clearly compared to WebMention which we have
currently listed in a group charter, I already created issue for that:
https://github.com/oshepherd/activitypump/issues/1


Second, I have impression of our current work very Activity Streams
centric. While I find activities a very important *part* of social
networking, I also recognize much border spectrum to it. If we look at
Use Cases currently listed on Social IG wiki, we will find ones
including: skills, affiliations, products+services etc. While of course
we can't cover *all of those* requirements within time of this charter,
we can at least ensure a clear way for future extensibility.


Third and for now last issue. Various other W3C groups work on IMO
relevant technologies. Our wiki lists quite few of them:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg#W3C_Groups For example people
participating in Hydra CG develop next generation REST APIs which could
cover some of required functionality. Another example Credentials CG
attracted people working on Mozilla Open Badges which I consider
extremely useful for Use Cases including skills, affiliations etc. I
guess clarifying collaboration with Web Schemas group may also take us
some time. I would like us to try come up with a better strategy on how
we can leverage all that work which people currently do in other groups.


My apologies for making this email pretty long. I don't expect that we
will find agreements on everything. Still having clarity as early as
possible on where we agree and where we disagree gives us much better
ground to work together. I really see big potential in this group and
hope that some flows in communication will not impact quality of the
outcomes from our collaborative effort.

Thank you for reading and taking time to reflect on it!

Received on Sunday, 9 November 2014 22:14:57 UTC