Re: WebID History - is also: Webid Editor/Author issue

On 1 June 2013 13:01, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

> Dear Manu Sporny,
>
>    thanks for the detailed feedback for your point of view.
> Let me put your view of WebID into the larger context
> of the history of WebID.
>
> By the time you came to the WebID party, we had already spent over
> 2 and a half years working on foaf+ssl - now WebID+TLS.  You
> can follow the back links in the current WebID-specification and you will
> get
> to the following version, which was the first one published on a
> W3C web site, and so having a reliable URL:
>
>   http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/foaf+ssl.html
>
> The Contributors to that version were
>
>   Bruno Harbulot, Ian Jacobi, Toby Inkster and me .
>
> These are the people I would put as being core to the WebID history,
> including some of the people who contributed to the early discussion
> here:
>
>
> http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2008-October/000000.html
>
> As you see it starts in 2008-03-25. In fact the spec needs to be updated
> and take
> into account this early history. And that is why I have Toby Inkster and
> Bruno Harbulot still on the Author's list.
>
> The history of the spec as it is currently starts with the version you
> put together, which fails to take into account the huge amount of research
> that we put together before your contribution. For example the ESWC paper
> where Bruno Harbulot and I explain formally the functioning of WebID+TLS
>
>   http://bblfish.net/tmp/2009/05/spot2009_submission_15.pdf
>
> At some point  on the foaf+ssl mailing list we thought we should put
> together a good looking  version of the spec. You did that initial work
> and put your name down as editor. This was 2010-07-11
>
>   https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/25ba7f596f07/index-respec.html
>
> So thanks a lot, that was a very nice contribution.
>
> Then we allowed everyone to clone the spec and edit it, in a bit of a
> bazaare way. You were playing the role of the editor. Things went quickly
> initially, and then slowed down in part because it was a bit politically
> tricky writing over other people's edits. Also it turned out you wanted to
> do
> something very different than what we had started off with, something
> that in fact you have worked on and ended up calling WebKeys. I was
> very keen on keeping things very simple, so that it did one thing well
> and not more.
>

Henry, thanks for the explanation.  However, I disagree with this
assertion, in part.  Arguably, you have not always simplified WebID.

Consider this post from 3 years ago, "The case for a massive simplification
of WebID"

http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2010-September/003705.html

This was exactly one of the changes that Manu proposed.  It was backed
Nathan, Kingsley, Manu and myself.  My view is that the community was
behind it.

You unilaterally rejected this proposal.

Your argument was "its not the semantic web way of doing things".  However,
more recently you reject the semantic web value proposition of "unintended
reuse", in favour of use case driven design.  Again another of Manu's
proposals to give keys their own URI.


>
> In the end you and I were the only people attending the teleconferences you
> had organised. I think that by August 2010 things had pretty much died
> down.
> So your contribution to the spec was for about 1 to 2 months.
>
> http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2010-July/003037.html
> I frankly thought it had been more than that.
>
> In August 2010 I passed by DERI in Gallway and there met Michael Hausenblas
> ( https://www.facebook.com/events/155476221135576/ ), who was much better
> than me at organising things, and he gave me the courage to go to the W3C.
> You'll notice that his name is on the W3C WebID Incubator group page.
>    http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/
> I also went to TPAC 2010 http://www.w3.org/2010/11/TPAC/ as it was in
> Lyon,
> and there sought further advice on what should be done.
> In December we finally got round to proposing an Incubator Group, which
> was accepted. See the discussion on the mailing list:
>
> http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2010-December/004203.html
> The spec we continued with still had at that time a lot of code you had
> checked
> in, as you can see here.
>
>    https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/annotate/c5234ae5aaca/index-respec.html
>
> If one removes the HTML W3C templating text then one could say the text is
> still
> 1/3 text you checked in at that point.
>
>    Even though you were invited you did not wish to participate in the
> Incubator
> Group. Clearly your idea of where you wanted to go with a standard in this
> space
> was different than where the community went. There was no bar to your
> coming in,
> or to you participating.
>

I do not agree that Manu's solution was incompatible with the community.
At least three members of the community, Manu, Dave, myself were supporters
and probably many more.  The only person that I recall to be against Manu's
contributions was was you.

Again I feel you acted unilaterally and furthermore, your debating style
tended to make things personal, which I think was unhelpful, and a barrier
to participation.


>
>    So in the mean time we have put more than 2 years of work into this
> spec.
> Which meant reading a lot of e-mails considering a lot of points of views,
> developing new code, etc... Now if I even just look at the contributions
> to the
> text of the spec of the January 2012 version which is the one published
> currently and listing you as author, there is absolutely no text that
> remains
> from what you put in initially
>
>
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/annotate/ac4608729123/spec/index-respec.html
>
> Notice that we did not list you as Editor. We could not. As Coralie Mercier
> pointed out in a mail to this group:
>
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webid/2013May/0081.html
>
> "All other W3C editors MUST be participants in the group responsible for
> the document(s)
> they are editing."
>
>   According to the criteria you put forward below for being author of a
> spec,
> in the mail to which this is a reply you wrote:
>
> > 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).
>
>
> So according to your own criteria, you cannot be an author of this spec
> either.
>
> But I don't need to rely on your word. Coralie Mercier pointed us to this
> Document Roles text http://www.w3.org/Signature/Contributor.html
>
> > Authors by their own initiative or through commitments to the Chairs
> make substantive contributions that are included within the specification.
> Frequently an author will make and write a proposal that is then the basis
> of a section of the specification. Criteria for authorship are the
> expressed interest (agreed to by the Chairs) to be listed as an author and
> the substance and quality of the contributions. The Chairs look at the
> consistency of participation, the willingness to take action items, and how
> much "authoring" the WG member actually accomplished. This criteria is
> somewhat relative in that if this role is designated, the Chairs wish to
> list the top handful of people that consistently plugged away on the work
> while avoid a list of names occupying the first two pages of the
> specification. Where the number of authors/editors are small, the Author
> and Editor role is frequently collapsed in to the Editor designation. Where
> there are numerous authors, the role will be a specified subset of the
> Contributor designation which is an Appendix to the specification.
>
> So "make substantive contributions that are included within the
> specification" is a key
> notion here, and though you did help us for a time it was quite short
> lived in the history
> of WebID. As a result I definitively have put your  name in the
> contributors sections,
> because it is absolutely clear that you have  contributed to the work. But
> just not
> as editor or as author. You did for a time, as the mercurial history
> shows, and the
> links to early versions of the spec also show. But according to those
> criteria
> the contributions are no longer editorial,  or authorial. And according to
> the history
> I told in this e-mail they are not conceptual either.
>
> My feeling is that the real issue is that you wanted us to merge two
> projects that were quite distinct,
> and you put a lot of effort into the process that _you_ were working on.
> These projects
> need not be incompatible. If they are compatible, you will have your name
> on the spec
> you have been working on, and the people who were working in this group
> will have their
> name on this spec. I don't really see what the problem is.
>
> So in conclusion I am not sawyed by your arguments here. If you want to
> fight this
> then please follow the official channels, and point them to this response
> of
> mine here. Following your definition and the W3Cs definition I just don't
> see
> how I can do otherwise.
>

Henry, you're a great chair, and a wonderful person in real life.  But your
debating style on email, is prone to exaggeration, and sometimes comes
across as dictatorial.  This can sometimes distance contributions to the
shared goals.

The web is all about the axiom of tolerance.  I hope that going forward we
can be more tolerant of other people's work and see where the synergies lie.


>
>    Yours sincerely,
>
>                 Henry Story
>
>
> On 1 Jun 2013, at 03:13, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>
> > 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/
> >
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>
>