Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
There will be a small spontaneous fedsocweb meetup at OHM2013, on the Friday afternoon. We will work out the exact location once we’re there, and announce it on the mailing list. So if you’re going to be at OHM, then please join us!
Warning: This will only be quite a small event, probably. There are also plans for doing bigger meetups to coincide with fscons and fosdem, so this is by no means “the” Europe-based fedsocweb event, or anything like that. It is only aimed at people who will be at OHM anyway, to get a chance to meet face-to-face and hopefully forge new and stronger relationships with other developers!
Registration is not necessary, just show up. The format could be something like:
lightning talks (5 minute blocks)
demos (15 minute blocks)
one-track unconference (30 minute blocks)
or an improvisation upon that theme. More info about in which exact tent we’ll meet is coming later. But if you’re going to OHM, then think about what you would like to present or bring up, and keep your Friday afternoon free for this. So stay tuned, and hope to see you there!
“Today, a bipartisan coalition of 86 civil liberties organizations and Internet companies – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, and the American Civil Liberties Union – are demanding swift action from Congress in light of the recent revelations about unchecked domestic surveillance.
“In an open letter to lawmakers sent today, the groups call for a congressional investigatory committee, similar to the Church Committee of the 1970s. The letter also demands legal reforms to rein in domestic spying and demands that public officials responsible for this illegal surveillance are held accountable for their actions.”
The open letter states:
“We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:
1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;
3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.
I agree with the sentiment of the open letter, but I do not agree that trust in the members of Congress is justified. They belong to those people who are responsible for the unconstitutional surveillance. They therefore would need to investigate themselves – which they will not do. To have real results these investigations must be done by others representing the population who are not connected to these circles.
EDIT: In the original version of this posting I stated “[The W3C is one of the signatories.]” That was not correct. The “World Wide Web Foundation” is one of the signatories. These are different organisations. But there are some relations between the two. For example Tim Berners-Lee is “Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation.”
“In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing “Talk” platform with a new one called “Hangouts” that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users.”
The current main task of this Community Group is the development of “Best Practices for the Open Social Web”. We are using the Wiki and the mailing list for that purpose. The document is in an initial stage of development:
I recently posted a proposal for a “Federated Social Network Data Standard” on the groups Wiki. I admit, that I have not searched the web thoroughly with respect to other initiatives like this; however, given the superficial research I have done, I have come to the conclusion that there are no open dialogs currently on this topic.
Over the next couple of days I will begin posting proposed technical specifications for the standard. I would like for everyone to contribute feedback and make suggestions/modifications.
The solution I am proposing is simple: we need to standardize social media content such that independent developers can create their own services that can share and aggregate data under a common standard. Much like the RSS format, this data standard should be open and free, not encumbered by patents, and be easy to implement.
The Federated Social Web Summit 2012 will take place on 26 October 2012 at 180 Townsend in San Francisco, CA. The full-day event will bring together people working on connecting social web software in different ways.
The event is for implementers – people working on the software and systems to build a distributed social web – and is invitation-only. Previous events have been high-bandwidth and high-intensity due to the concentration of smoking-hot social genius into such a small space.
The invitation list shows people and projects that are going to be invited; if you think there’s someone (maybe you?) who should be on the list, please let me know.
And watch this space for more news as it comes out.
The new, and hopefully improved Kickstarter page and video are now up at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
Take a look! Comments welcome. So are donations, likes, tweets, diggs, +1s, re-distribution, blog posts, and any other visibility! And… if you happen to have a large, distributed project coming up – a conference, event, crowd sourcing effort, flash performance, disaster response exercise that just begs for a collaboration support tool – let’s talk!
Maybe this will interest some of you: I’ve been working on a distributed project management tool.
Short story: We have complicated PM tools that nobody uses, we have simple tools, but they’re all centralized web services. What’s missing is something simple (like checklists, spreadsheets), and distributed (like Git). I’m trying to hit simple + distributed/peer-to-peer, running in a browser, linked by open protocols.
Take a look: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
