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

On 1 Jun 2013, at 14:22, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On 1 June 2013 13:32, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
> 
> On 1 Jun 2013, at 13:20, "Andreas Kuckartz" <A.Kuckartz@ping.de> wrote:
> 
> > Henry Story:
> >>  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.
> >
> > I do not understand this. "author" != "editor".
> 
> Ah yes.
> 
> The next paragraph in Manu's e-mail was the relevant one
> 
> > You are an author of the document if you've contributed foundational
> > ideas, arguments, or spec text to the body of the document.
> 
> And I don't believe Manu satisfies those criteria.
> The ideas and arguments had been published in academic journals and on
> the W3c site before. And as Manu wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> so the spec text is probably a lot of text I wrote out there on the subject
> in wikis and blog posts.
> 
> What it boils down to is whether manu contributed foundational arguments, ideas or spec text to the original spec.
> 
> Given that he WROTE the first spec, and contributed many edits, it's a difficult position to take that he provided none of these.  

Well that is what I disagree with, and which I have always found quite rude in Manu's position. 
He formatted  the work we had done in the prevous two years into a w3c format, and never 
mentioned the previous work, which was published on the W3C web site. 

  http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/foaf+ssl.html

Just compare how close Manu's "foundational" text here is to the above:

  https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/25ba7f596f07/index-respec.html

You will see the first two paragraphs just are copied straight out of that paper.
Manu's work just is _not_  foundational of WebID.

Had he joined the WebID group and continued to contribute as an editor 
then the continued work over time would have been something to seriously
take into consideration.

Anyway now that I understand the role of the author, we have very good reason to
keep Bruno Harbulot, and others who were present in the early workings out of WebID.
I really appreciate those days when we had tightly argued discussions on the 
mailing list, and we made huge leaps and bounds of progress.

> 
> If you definitively feel that he should not be there, then he's said he wont contest it, but it does not do wonder in terms of "communications and image" for webid.  

What do you think it does to the image of WebID if someone whose name is as an author, 
goes around attacking webid with bad arguments?
> 
> I'd suggest leaving all the authors in place, for the time being, and trying to understand the new work Manu has done with WebIDs.  We all want secure encryption, signatures, and payments, right?  Also take time to explain to people how WebID has improved in the last 2 years, many (including dan brickley, inventor of FOAF) have asked for you to continue your excellent blogging series that got people interested in WebID in the first place.
> 
> Why not let things cool down a bit.  And if at some point in the future you feel that Manu's contribution was not 'foundational', talk to him in person about it, and change the spec accordingly.  

Look I understand Manu's role. And I am thankful for having given us the 
impetus to start a process of getting us to start using the W3C templates 
to write up a spec. But I don't think that is powerful enough to get 
authorship role.

Le me remind you of Coralie Mercier's pointer
 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.

But Manu certainly is an important contributor. Perhaps there are ways of acknowledging
contributions more carefully.


> 
> Now a lot of Manu's company's work was on an implementation of TLS in
> JavaScript, and that is an impressive amount of work, but it's not spec
> work.
> 
> Thanks for helping me to clarify this Andreas.
> 
>         Henry
> 
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Andreas
> 
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
> 
> 
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/