Role of W3C in Open-Microblgging, and standards for the Social Web in general?

Everyone,

   Also inspired by the latest invited talk on Open Microblogging,
Evan (and others!),  what do you think is the role of standards
organizations around the Social Web? This is an especially important
question that we need to attempt to provide an answer to in our XG
final report for the W3C. In particular, it seems to me there are
three options:

1) The W3C: Has a clear, well-defined process for producing
Recommendations with a clear timeline and formal process [1] and
support of teleconference call, staff, and infrastructure. It has a
well-designed Royalty-free patent policy to encourage its standards
being open [2]. At the same time, except for "Invited Experts" it is
seen as being the domain of only members,and so its difficult for
non-members to interact. So far, not much around the Social Web has
happened at the W3C.

2) IETF: The IETF has the advantage of having a totally open process
for participating, which I could see really appeal to many people that
aren't W3C members. At the same time, the process is more informal [3]
(I admit not knowing about any patent policy as well) and it seems
like a few Social Web standards are going to the IETF, such as OAuth.

3) DIY: After all, one can just post a web-page up and see if anyone
implements.This is what has happened with Open Microblogging, FOAF,
Activity Streams. Others are setting up their own foundations like
OpenSocial, which has a light-weight process, [4] and OpenID, which
also is interested in keeping the standard open [5]. Open Web
Foundation has been pretty mysterious (I say this as a member), but
some have said that it seems like it not might be more like the
ApacheProject than  a standards process.

What would you view as an *ideal* social web standards process? What's
the strengths and weaknesses of the W3C, IETF, and just
doing-it-yourself?

          cheers,
                harry

[1]http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/
[2]http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/
[3]http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt
[4]http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Specification_Process
[5]http://openid.net/intellectual-property/

Received on Friday, 9 October 2009 18:58:07 UTC