Re: R: moving to Community Group?

Hi,

I'm the guy behind the New Social Web project.  I've posted occasionally 
to this list and it's precursor, and participated in a couple of the 
conference calls, but it might be time for a re-introduction.

I started the project when I discovered Mozilla Drumbeat about a year 
and a half ago.  I had recently left Facebook after yet another revision 
of its privacy policy and was wishing for something better.  Social 
networks struck me as something with a lot of potential, but that 
potential seemed unlikely to be realized while centrally controlled, 
closed-off networks were the norm.  It seemed to me that an open network 
where individual profiles could be set up and interact something like 
independent websites in the WWW would be a much better way to do this, 
and lead to innovation that could never happen otherwise.

I had never set up a website before, and my only coding experience was a 
smattering of BASIC back in high school and a course in Turbo Pascal in 
college, so I wasn't going to be writing any software myself.  I thought 
if I could set up a project and get other people interested, we might 
get some people interested in building something.  At the time I had no 
idea anyone was working on anything of the kind.

While I was writing up my ideas to post to Drumbeat the New York Times 
article on Diaspora came out and suddenly lots of people were talking 
about the same things I was thinking.  I went ahead and posted my 
project, "We Need a Free and Open Social Network".  My basic intent at 
the time was to create a forum for brainstorming on the idea with others 
and find ways to publicize the issue to a wider audience.

I soon found there were already plenty of people working on it.  Unlike 
me, rather than simply unhappy users, most of them were developers 
coming at the issue from a completely different angle.  Rather than 
engaging in high-level discussion of what a social network ought to be, 
they appeared buried in the technology itself- looking at the pieces and 
thinking, "what can I build with this?"

It was fun to watch.  I stepped in with stupid questions from time to 
time, but mostly just tried to listen and learn as they worked.  I 
learned quite a bit- for me- but I'm still far from able to contribute 
anything of a technical nature.  Instead I've tried to work on keeping 
the idea visible to others, setting up a website and wiki and posting 
relevant news to social networks.  I also worked on the Distributed 
Social Networks Wikipedia article and set up this list 
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzdPeGdPNlhZSHFMelg0MnQ2N2c&hl=en#gid=0> 
of projects.

As far as this W3C group goes, I'm hoping that moving to a Community 
Group will open things up a bit more and find more people getting 
involved.  I think there are good ideas out there beyond what have been 
discussed here.  I also think broadening the discussion a bit beyond the 
in-front-of-your-eyes technical details to looking at alternative 
approaches could be useful.  It does happen, but since the majority here 
are web developers mostly things are viewed through a set of assumptions 
that might differ from those of network-level programmers, OS hackers, 
app builders, sociologists, or philosophers (like Henry :-)) for 
example.  Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the next 
months.

Brad Kipfer
newsocialweb.org



On 08/31/2011 05:35 AM, Harry Halpin wrote:
> On 08/29/2011 10:18 PM, Goix Laurent Walter wrote:
>>  From what i read it seems there may be different interests in 
>> continuing this group's activity.
>>
>> I can hear interests for producing specifications/standardizing some 
>> protocols to achieve federation (e.g. OStatus&  related protocols - 
>> the industry is asking for stable and referenced open specifications 
>> on this topic), and others more focused on creating/improving a 
>> community of developers around federated social web in general, to 
>> share experiences, propose new concepts or disruptive evolutions.
>>
>> I would be personally interested by both but I realize they may need 
>> different spaces to live in. What could be the best solution to 
>> achieve both these objectives within W3C?
>>
>> Regards
>> Walter
>>
>> -----Messaggio originale-----
>> Da: public-xg-federatedsocialweb-request@w3.org 
>> [mailto:public-xg-federatedsocialweb-request@w3.org] Per conto di 
>> Andreas Kuckartz
>> Inviato: sabato 27 agosto 2011 3.28
>> A: public-xg-federatedsocialweb@w3.org
>> Oggetto: Re: moving to Community Group?
>>
>> Am 26.08.2011 17:00, schrieb Evan Prodromou:
>>> I'd like to suggest that we dip our toes in the water and move some
>>> of the protocols that are under discussion in this group (like OStatus)
>>> to community groups, and if it seems to make sense after those are
>>> going, move this group, too.
>> I fear that such a partial move might split the discussions a bit (and
>> therefore the community) even if only temporarily. I am interested in a
>> group of standards which is as coherent as possible and therefore think
>> that a permanent common discussion ground is a good thing.
>>
>> And, btw, maybe we can begin to use some of the protocols (in addition
>> to http and smtp) for such collaboration?
>
> I think the best choice would be to just transition this group 
> entirely to a Community Group as a general discussion forum - and give 
> ourselves some concrete tasks. It seems there has been little momentum 
> over test-cases, so maybe we should try to make a coherent 
> architecture diagram, or try to get a actual engagement from say, the 
> top 5 code-bases, in terms of committing to some real test-cases?
>
> Then for each spec idea then a new Community Group can be launched, 
> and then once the spec matures it can be taken to either the IETF, 
> W3C, or somewhere else as appropriate.
>
> Efforts like the "New Social Web" should of course be reached out at 
> and we should try to keep momentum going. I mean, "New Social Web" 
> seems to an English teacher with 3,000 some "twitter" style followers. 
> A good sign IMHO, but I can't find a link to separate code or specs 
> [1]. In fact, he seems to be mostly tweeting about using Diaspora, 
> Status.Net, and Friendika.
>
>    cheers,
>        harry
>
> [1] https://drumbeat.org/en-US/projects/the-new-social-web-project/
>
>
>> Cheers,
>> Andreas
>>
>>
>>
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>> di provvedere alla sua distruzione, Grazie.
>>
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