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

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org> wrote:
> 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.

Personaly, I'd like to see the W3C standardize common interactions
between web sites using socially oriented semantic vocabularies.  In
particular:

- FOAF
- ACL
- Web of Trust

As well as to interact with the wider linked open data cloud.

Im not 100% sure what path this could take, but I'd personally like to
see working prototypes, between heterogeneous systems.

Additionally, I think building bridge technologies, to existing open
technologies, where appropriate, should be encouraged.

>
> 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 Saturday, 10 October 2009 15:21:45 UTC