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

On 1 June 2013 14:53, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

>
> 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
>

This version certainly does mention the previous paper

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/drafts/ED-webid-20100711/


>
> 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?
>

Because it would be better to do in private, if you felt strongly about
it.  Consider how this thread would appear to a newcomer to the group, or
someone with a casual interest.


>
> 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.
>

At the end of the XG we had a conf call with Timbl.  He said that to take
webid to a WG we needed to write a charter.  That was the next key action
for the XG.  Timbl said that writing a charter is a substantial amount of
work and that sometimes the result of a whole XG is simply to create a
charter.

I consider writing a spec to be also challenging in this regard.  Manu took
a huge number of inputs curated and edited them and presented them in a way
that partially survives today.  Although much of the document was taken
from previous sources, it's hard to claim that there was no original text
at all.  e.g. I dont recall seeing the term "verification agent" which is
used in todays spec previously, but there are numerous other edits.

To prove manu did not make a foundational contribution, you need to prove
that ALL of the document(s) was contained no foundational input from Manu.
This is not obviously the case, but if you feel strongly about it, perhaps
it would be better for the image of webid to continue that privately, in a
conversation with Manu.


>
>
>
>> 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/
>
>