Re: Webid Editor/Author issue

On 05/29/2013 10:02 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> On 29 May 2013 12:46, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net 
> <mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net>> wrote: Ok if you want to be picky:
>  he has not contributed in the past 2 years and 10 months. The 
> Incubator Group started on 14 January 2011
> 
> I'm not trying to be picky.  Just that your statement was 
> inconsistent. You may even note that Manu posted on the webid mailing
> list as recently last month.
> 
> In a short space of time, Manu turned a collection of blog posts, 
> wiki pages and a position paper, into a spec.  Much of which survives
> today in terms of structure, naming and definition.  He also provided
> an open source implementation, and would have done much more, had
> there been a more welcoming environment.

I think Melvin has a very good grasp of the situation and I thank him
for his contributions to this thread. He's spot on.

I'm just going to jump in briefly here, but won't linger, as these sorts
of dysfunctional discussions are exactly the reason why I felt that we
wouldn't be able to make WebID work. It wasn't the technical work that
was going to be difficult, it was going to be working with Henry's
fairly rigid philosophy on WebID. I've spoken with a number of others in
the identity space that have had the same problems with Henry, and
chosen not to work with the WebID group for the same reasons. I know I'm
not alone in this opinion and that there are several very large
companies that have backed away from WebID for this very reason.

Just to be clear, I don't hold any personal grudge against Henry. I've
spoken with a number of people that know him personally and say that
he's very pleasant face-to-face.

That said - rather than focusing on the technical work here, there is a
discussion happening where the Chair of the group is trying to remove
one of the initial authors of the specification for reasons that are
unique to this group. No one consulted me about the removal of my name
from a document that I initially authored. I can't imagine this
happening in the academic community without the words "plagiarism" or
"theft" coming up in the discussion. I've never seen this "authorship"
conversation play out in the way that it has in this group.

Digital Bazaar's Contributions
------------------------------

In 2009, Digital Bazaar (my company) was trying to find an identity
solution for the Web Payments work. We found what was then FOAF+SSL and
thought there was a kernel of a good idea there. After discussions in
early 2010 with Henry and some of the W3C team, Digital Bazaar decided
to put significant resources behind making FOAF+SSL successful (with a
number of changes that we thought was necessary in order to get buy-in
from Web browser manufacturers).

I decided to gather much of the writing across the Web and put it into a
coherent specification that would then be used to pitch a WebID Working
Group at W3C. Our engineers started on a reference implementation. With
the help of the community, we rebranded it from FOAF+SSL to WebID and I
created the WebID logo and created a website presence for the spec work.
This was March-July 2010... so, five months of work for the first cut at
the spec and implementation. I put an enormous amount of work into
creating the first spec, which admittedly was fairly concise, but doing
that takes a lot of work and thinking.

A large amount of time was spent lobbying the W3C to pick up the WebID
work and we finally got a shot to do so in the fall of 2010. The attempt
was a colossal failure due to reasons that are contentious to this day.
Ultimately, W3C management saw that Henry and I were having difficulty
working together and decided to pass up on a Working Group at that time
because they sensed an interpersonal conflict. Keep in mind that I have
now chaired multiple groups at W3C, have never had such a problem in
those groups, and have helped bring RDFa, JSON-LD, HTTP Signatures, Web
Keys, and the Web Payments work to where it is today by successfully
working with my fellow WG and CG members.

I have failed to move work forward twice due to conflicts - the first
with Ian Hickson, the second with Henry Story. The conflict with Ian was
never personal and he and I still communicate to work through issues
today. I can't say the same for the other conflict.

After the rejection by the W3C, we were undeterred and continued
attempting to convince the WebID group for an additional year that WebID
needed to switch to a mechanism that didn't require browser buy-in.
Frustrated, we finally gave up in 2011 after 18 months of trying to
convince Henry to change direction with WebID and ripped it out of the
Web Payments specifications.

I say all of this because it wasn't a small amount of effort, as Henry
is portraying, that my company put into WebID. It was 18 months of hard
technical and specification work. To have our names removed from the
specification is a bit of a slap in the face.

Editor and Authorship Requirements
-----------------------------------

Typically, Authors are people that contributed in a fairly large way to
a specification. For example, you will note that RDFa 1.1 bears the
names of the following Editors: Ben, Mark, Shane, and Ivan:

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core/

In reality, Ben and Mark were not involved at all in the 3 years of work
that went into RDFa Core 1.1. They were, however, instrumental in
creating RDFa 1.0 and providing many of the initial conceptual work on
the specification. We stand on the shoulder of giants, and all that.

As chair of that group, I felt it would be intellectually dishonest of
the group to remove Ben and Mark's name from the top of the
specification, and prepared myself to fight any suggestion that we
should do so. In reality, that discussion never came up. The group
didn't even think it worth discussing as we understood that there are
very few rewards for working on these specifications, and having your
name at the top of the document is an acknowledgement by the community
for all the hard work that goes into creating a specification (most of
which is not in writing the actual specification).

Each group deals with this sort of thing differently and the chair of
the group plays a large role in determining how the names appear at the
head of the document. I've always used this general rule:

You are an editor of the document if you've contributed at least 25% of
the bulk of the edits to the specification (modulo obvious
search/replace/bulk copying changes).

You are an author of the document if you've contributed foundational
ideas, arguments, or spec text to the body of the document.

Editors and authors are sorted by the magnitude of their contributions.
You can see this philosophy applied clearly in the latest JSON-LD
specifications:

http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld-api/

We discussed the order of each of the editors/authors list with all of
the editors and authors to make sure that we were being fair to everyone
and honoring their contribution to the body of work. People were removed
from the Authors list along the way, but in every one of those
instances, we had an in-depth discussion with the author to make sure
that they would not be offended if they were removed. In every case,
they volunteered to be removed based on the criteria listed above.

Removal from WebID Specification
--------------------------------

Regarding the removal of my name from the Authorship list for the WebID
specification - I disagree that it should be done, and if you do so, you
strip my name from the list against my will.

If anything, Dave Longley should be added to the specification as an
author for contributing a number of important ideas and a foundational
implementation.

I'll also note that those that remove my name from the specification are
glossing over a large number of intellectual property and copyright
concerns that, if you were dealing with someone that believed in
enforcing that sort of thing for his work, would have a field day with
tying the specification up in a whole host of legal red tape. This is
the sort of thing that gets academics stripped of their credentials.

But rather than follow that path, I will defer to the consensus of the
group. If you remove me as an author, you do so against my will, but if
it happens, I'm not going to put up a fight.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Saturday, 1 June 2013 01:13:47 UTC