Re: ActiviPy 0.1 release: feedback welcome!

Melvin Carvalho writes:

> On 3 November 2015 at 22:42, Shane Hudson <Shane@shanehudson.net> wrote:
>
>> Sure, but it puts a lot of people off. In the same way the old HTML
>> doctype was scary, despite it actually not being required to understand it.
>>
>
> Appreciate the point of view, and largely agree.  Personally a big believe
> in simplicity driving adoption.
>
> However, everyone's will have an opinion on what form that will take, and
> often feel it strongly.  The web is so big, that there's something about
> almost every technology that puts *a lot* of people off.  Just as in sport
> there's something about almost every football team that puts *a lot* of
> people off.  Many people are put off JSON LD, or LD in general, because
> they have never tried it.  I say that because, I was in this camp for a
> LONG time, but when I actually used it, I found it remarkably easy.  A lot
> easier than its reputation for complexity.
>
> IMHO, it's can be more constructive to talk about technical barriers,
> implementation feedback on this that have been tried, and actual feedback
> from adopters.  As such I've tried to document adopters of JSON LD on this
> wiki page:
>
> https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/Media_type_for_AS2#Iterop_Considerations_-_application.2Fld.2Bjson
>
> I think it's valuable to share insights on what developers will and wont
> like, but let's appreciate that there are lots of unknowns, as AS2 hasnt
> been tried out yet by many people.  If there's a significant deployment
> that has good technical feedback or objections that's going to be valuable,
> let's try and document specific pain points.

BTW Melvin, my goal here in ActiviPy is to provide an entry into using
ActivityStreams (technically it can do other vocabularies too, which
may be better promoted in the future) while keeping it easy for those
to whom linked data may be foreign initially.  However, there's an
explicit goal towards encouraging exploration of linked data.  You can
see this in the documentation here:

  http://activipy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html#expanding-our-vocabulary

In other words, I think the "compact json-ld representation" is a great
gateway drug into encouraging people to explore linked data type tools.
There's definitely a goal of encouraging people to notice that doorknob
so they can turn it and explore when ready, but also helping people
become comfortable immediately with an environment which looks like that
which they already know.

So even though ActiviPy doesn't start with introducing a straight-up
linked data approach, I think the approach it does take is a nice method
by which we might see people exploring that space more!

 - Chris

Received on Wednesday, 4 November 2015 16:14:30 UTC