RE: Position Paper for W3C Workshop on Identity

So that's a political issue, and it comes down to leadership. I can only
push so far....as at the end of the day this is/was a W3C group, beholden to
the TBL vision of social change. Only the revolution, induced through a
certain inter-subjective, socio-political process, is "true web". Yada Yada.

I have no problem with the thrust of your suggestion (though a less abstract
term might be warranted): recognizing that it implies that we endorse XRD
(signed) too, as the alternative to the foaf card.

Personally, this is the position I would take when looking for "wider
adoption" and when appealing to an "multi-tradition" audience like the
browser folks. Always be agnostic overall, and somewhat deferential to
others' "twists" on your own idea. However, show QUITE some preference to
one's own idea (e.g. foaf cards), but don't be "outright hostile" to the
other group's largely equivalent idea (XRD, for webfinger, and for Google
cloud etc). Assume, a meet in the middle will be required, to go "global".

I happily admitted PGP for years into the certs debate, showing its trust
model was identical to a chain of self-signed X.509 certs linked by a cert
store, whose entrance was guarded by a metric (even the PGP one, for all I
cared). I didn't have to be anti-PGP to justify X.509 (I just had to enable
the PGP rants against evil X.509 format, evil ASN.1, and evil CAs to be seen
as rants, as uncompromising, and as ultimately rather false and posturing in
the rhetoric; so inducing the movement to fall on its own sword). A billion
PCs now have the ASN.A that was too hard (and un-American, for a while), the
cert format that no one understand, and using entirely decentralized CAs
based on trust anchors (managed by those evil Browser vendors..., and their
even more evil audit partners)

And this is where we tend to fail: we make out all the rest of the world is
somehow evil..or "not webby", or in some way less than pure. Now, we cannot
meet in the middle, or handle the legacy web (that was in vogue, in W3C,
only a year or two, ago). We have to induce an entire revolution (TBL
style). And, those are hard to make! 

AS I said at the top of the missive. It comes down to leadership skill. And,
I ain't got it.




-----Original Message-----
From: public-xg-webid-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-webid-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Kingsley Idehen
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 11:35 AM
To: public-xg-webid@w3.org
Subject: Re: Position Paper for W3C Workshop on Identity

On 4/20/11 1:08 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>> If  were choosing, Id be arguing around the inoffensive topic of the 
>> foaf card (that happens to bring along the semweb with it).
>
> Why not structured profile document where foaf card in an example? To 
> many FOAF == RDF == Semweb. Thus, cleaner abstraction will provide 
> more protection against knee jerk reactions.
Meant to say:

Why not structured profile document where foaf card *is* an example?

To many, FOAF == RDF == Semweb. Thus, cleaner abstraction will provide 
more protection against knee jerk reactions.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Wednesday, 20 April 2011 20:30:02 UTC