Task forces proposal

Task Forces Proposal

Gist of the proposal: Provided there are sufficient people willing to take
an active role in this XG, the work could be larger than a "typical"
Incubator group and be more efficiently reached by dividing ourselves into
task forces.

Task Forces would/will focus incubator group member activity on specific
achievable goals. 

What kind of task forces are we talking about here? That is for the XG
members to define, based on their interests/areas of expertise. 

By way of inspiration for you our discussion on if task forces are
possible/a good idea, and if so, what task forces should be formed, I
provide (below) the framework for Social Web task force activities developed
a few months ago. 

It was inspired by the framework we developed and used for the W3C Future of
Social Networking Workshop. 

Seven task forces:

1. Landscape Task Force

2. Privacy and Trust Task Force

3. Business Task Force

4. Contextual Data Task Force

5. User Experience task Force

6. Interoperability Task Force

7. Distributed Architectures Task Force

Notes: Some of the people who expressed interested in these task forces may
no longer be available. 
It is not required that all task forces begin at the start of the
incubator's activity. There may be delays either due to lack of appropriate
leader or contributors, dependencies or lack of time on behalf of the
incubator group's members. 

=============================

Now that you have (above) a "snapshot" of the task forces from 10,000
meters, here are the definitions/scopes we had prepared for each task force:

1. Landscape Task Force 

Social networking technical activities are underway in many different
industry groups and consortia. At the same time, there remain many topics
with little or no coverage (no one is paying attention). The incubator
group's participants, and the W3C members, need a "bird's eye view" of
social networking developments in order to identify appropriate areas for
work. 

The objective of this task force is to put in place a living framework and
resource which tracks the activities to be started, those underway, those
which have been concluded in the domain. It is also a vehicle by which to
prioritize work as well as to identify partnerships. 

2. Privacy and Trust Task Force

This task force will explore how specific approaches to ensuring user and
user data privacy and trust can improve the security and reduce risks of
users. This task force is also responsible for the development of best
practices recommendations on privacy in social networks. 

3. Business Task Force

The long range goal is to establish widely accepted business terms for use
in describing social network activity and to map these into the future to
better understand how social networking market dynamics can be quantified.
The first step will be to document and to compare the existing methods of
social network measurement. The group could propose metrics and benchmarks
for appropriate expression of social network size, activity level and value.


4. Contextual Data Task Force

The mission of this task force is to document those principles which the
task force members believe to be the appropriate use & approaches to control
of abuse of contextual data in social networks. One of the deliverables of
this task force is a report mapping the current uses of context in social
networking.  A best practices guide could also be envisioned, provided that
sufficient experience and expertise is available. 

5. User Experience task Force

*	To discover and document best practices for smoothing the user´s way
through the Social Web. 

*	To present information on what´s going on in an understandable way. 

*	To simplify and clarify all technical processes with a clear
interaction design. 

*	To identify, develop and document interaction and information
patterns suitable to be quickly adopted by Social Web sites/platforms. 

*	To identify and document best navigation and interaction practices
suitable and possible both for desktop and mobile devices. 

*	To identify and document bad usability issues that could harm the
overall user´s experience. 

6. Interoperability Task Force

The focus will be insuring that social data portability can be built on open
standards and existing deployed APIs as deployed by vendors and the
community. The task force will: 

*	work to promote the work of other non-W3C groups working on the
Social Web within the W3C and raise awareness of the landscape of Social Web
technologies within the W3C. 

*	survey the needs of users of social web sites, and propose use-cases
for social data portability to address these needs, with a focus on social
data portability and relationships of trust and privacy. 

*	determine if these use-cases can be built on top of existing
standards and help determine what other standards are needed. 

*	Most importantly, mappings between currently widely deployed
technical solutions for both users and developers will be developed on the
level of semantics, with an various syntax options and even data models
(XML, JSON, RDF) being capable of expressing this information. Ideally
working converters in a variety of programming languages will be created for
these mappings. 

*	Furthermore, although more still an area for research, privacy,
trust, and security concerns should be addressed and the landscape of
technologies in this area will be surveyed. 

7. Distributed Architectures Task Force

This task force will analyze different scenarios where the distributed
architecture for the social network is an advantage, identify possible
architectures and protocols that may lead to a sound distributed social
network ecosystem, identify what new work has to be carried out in order to
have this distributed social network implemented. 

===============================================

On each task force there is a little to a lot (depending on the task force)
additional/background information. Additional info includes who expressed
interest in a task force, the type of deliverable which was envisioned. 

You may consult the background on this wiki page[1]. Please note that this
wiki page was used for purpose of guiding our discussion during a
teleconference meeting conducted on March 4, 2009. Some information on the
page was moved into the charter which was submitted. Much of the content of
the page is no longer relevant.  

I am not, by way of this e-mail, suggesting any Next Steps. There should be
some! 

I don't think that e-mail is the best way to discuss this topic but it is an
effective way to share with the group what they are referring to when Harry
or Dan or Dan say "Task Forces" and they asked me to explain to all what had
been previously proposed. 

I hope it is the fulfillment of the action item I took during our call on
May 6. 

Regards,

Christine 

Spime Wrangler 

 <mailto:cperey@perey.com> cperey@perey.com 

mobile (Swiss): +41 79 436 68 69

from US: +1 (617) 848 8159

from anywhere (Skype): Christine_perey 


[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/UnifiedSocialXG