Re: Priority of Constituencies proposal

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:56 AM, Jason Robinson <mail@jasonrobinson.me> wrote:
> Out of interest - what exactly is the "Minimal Activity Stream", in relation
> to AS2? (other than minimal, obviously ;))
>

There are some members of the working group who aren't happy with the
current AS2 Working Draft and rather than submitting pull requests or
suggesting improvements, they've started drafting up a completely new
alternative format based generally around a loose adaptation of the
Activity model to Microformats. The "Minimal Activity Stream" draft
currently has no official standing in the Working Group and has been
worked on outside of the regular WG processes. I *believe* the intent
of the authors is to bring it to the WG in the coming week or so and
propose it either as an addition to, or alternative to the current AS2
Working Draft.

> Just wondering since there is little in the page as a foreword explanation
> as to "why".
>
> Also, the "Priority of Constituencies" is very common sense to me, something
> I would imagine people would just keep in mind normally. If the WG gets
> really stuck then maybe it would be a good idea, but doesn't seem that stuck
> to me? AFAICT, unless the minimal stream is changing things somehow, AS2
> with JSON is the strongest contender as a recommendation. I might be wrong,
> not following all the discussion or being in the calls. I realize the "MUST"
> vote failed, but then in reality this WG is building a recommendation
> anyway. The question is - how *many* overlapping recommendations. A spec
> should only recommend one thing, not several "overlapping" things.
>

Indeed. One should always keep such priorities in mind when building
these types of specs. The issue for me at this point is around the
timing and apparent motivation of the proposal.

The key challenge that I see is that in the 12+ months that this
Working Group has been active, the ONLY viable work product that has
been produced are the two Activity Streams 2.0 documents (core and
vocabulary), and now instead of working collaboratively to get AS2
across that Candidate Recommendation "finish line", there are a subset
of WG participants who seem intent on throwing AS2 out because of
philosophical differences of opinion around the use of the @ character
in JSON and the naming of certain properties. It's rather a bit like
leaving the yak half shaved so we can go rebuild and repaint the bike
shed a few more times.

- James

> Br,
> Jason
>
> On 27.10.2015 05:12, Harry Halpin wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/26/2015 10:44 PM, James M Snell wrote:
>
> I've seen the very constructive feedback from Jason
> (https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/2015Oct/0191.html).
> I'm quite certain that he can continue to speak for himself. As I said,
> based on the constructive feedback, tweaks are being made
> (https://github.com/jasnell/w3c-socialwg-activitystreams/pull/220). The most
> productive thing to do at this point is for potential implementers to keep
> feeding in *constructive*, *specific* discussion so that *specific*
> improvements can continue to be made. We won't make progress talking about
> process yet again.
>
>
> I think the process suggestion re "Priority of Constituencies" is rather
> common-sense - and still useful, as now in addition to specific feeback, we
> have an *alternative* syntax to AS2.0 being developed in the WG:
>
> https://github.com/w3c-social/Social-Syntax-Brainstorming/wiki/Minimal-Activity-Stream
>
> I'd prefer to have one spec. The "Priority of Constituencies" is one way to
> deal with situation where there is conflict between specs or designs. In
> addition, a co-editor for AS2.0 would be make sense, perhaps Aaron given the
> work on Minimal Activity Streams?
>
>        cheers,
>             harry
>
>
> --
> -----
> Br,
> Jason Robinson
> https://jasonrobinson.me

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2015 21:12:41 UTC