I have been elected to a two year term on the W3C TAG!
I'm really excited for this opportunity to work for a better Web, and more than a little bit daunted. And so so grateful for all of the support people have given me during the election, which I did not expect to be as intense as it was.
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I'm gonna be in and out of APConf today and tomorrow, starting in a couple of hours. While the live video bits are full, the talks are all prerecorded and available to anyone, and there's chat on SocialHub that everyone can join in with as well.
I'm extremely multitasking so won't be 100% available but do feel free to ping me or loop me into any conversations you think I might be interested in and I'll do my best to keep on top of things.
(PS. I'm in the keynote panel :D)
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For the last year I have been honoured to be part of the OCCRP Data Team, working with and for amazing tecchies and journalists, wrangling data I'd never dreamed of and learning things about the world I never expected. I'm loathe to leave
but
change beckons
and this month I'm excited to be joining the fully-remote data-wrangling-for-good workers cooperative Open Data Services.
I'm honestly astounded I keep finding great jobs in tech that support my idealistic world view, let me make a living working for positive change, with people who share my ethical stances, whilst travelling the world. I know I'm astonishingly privileged to be able to be so picky about the kind of jobs I take in the first place. It's mindblowing that I have been consistently in work for the past few years despite this.
This article was published in issue #296 (Summer 2017) of net magazine!
You may by now have come across the notion of 're-decentralising' the Web, particularly the Social Web. This is about gaining better control over where we store our personal data. It has become common practice to hand over our data to a few major companies in exchange for 'free' services like games, productivity apps, email, and of course social media. Linked Data Notifications (LDN) is a W3C Recommendation, and one of several protocols standardised by the Social Web Working Group as a core mechanism to make decentralisation possible.
Right now, when you get a notification from your favourite social networking app (or your calendar, or your hotel reservation site) you can view it once within that closed system, and then it tends to disappear. Imagine if you could choose a trusted location to store your notifications data (for example a personal data store or server) and grant access to different applications. Notifications are no longer locked in to the system which generated them in the first place; data from one application can be reused by another.
There are clear benefits of this practice. The end user is free to switch between applications without having to input the necessary data from scratch each time, as well as changing where their data is stored without disrupting the apps they use, because applications can just re-discover the new location. This benefits application developers too, who can now focus on their core product or service. LDN integration means that applications can nonetheless enhance their functionality when users choose to share notification data from complementary services, and benefit from a standard mechanism for doing so rather than depending on the proprietary API of a third-party social network provider.
LDN is a simple HTTP-based protocol which describes three roles in notification-oriented interactions: senders, receivers, and consumers. Any resource on the Web (from a user profile to a single blog post) may advertise a receiving endpoint (their "Inbox"). Doing so is like pointing to a webhook URL, with LDN standardising the discovery mechanism. The receiver accepts requests from senders (for new notifications) and exposes received notifications in a standard format for other applications (consumers) to reuse. The sender can place any data in the contents of a notification - as much or as little as the application determines is useful for its own future reuse, or for sharing with other consumer applications in the same domain. Consumer applications which discover and read in the notification data could use notification contents to trigger another process in a system, or simply display it in a user interface.
So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in social networking scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments through monitoring the state of online resources, datasets and files, or sensor outputs, and sending notifications when changes occur.
LDN serves as a building block rather than a complete solution for re-decentralisation. The three roles (sender, receiver, and consumer) can be implemented independently from each other (if you want to build a sender, you don't need to build a receiver to do so), or all together in one system. If you don't want to build your own "Inbox" (and let's face it, most people won't) you can rent one from a third-party you trust. Just like outsourcing the hosting of your social media profile today, but without the service-specific lock-in. No matter where your "Inbox" resides, any application can send notifications there. The protocol works well alongside other emerging or completed W3C standards such as ActivityStreams 2.0, ActivityPub, and the Web Annotations Protocol.
You can get started with LDN today; check out a growing list of reference implementations, and run your implementation against the test suite. Although the standardization process is complete, new implementors are nonetheless encouraged to run the tests and submit the automatically generated implementation reports. The W3C Social Web Community Group is the place to go for follow-up questions and comments about integrating this standard into your applications.
You can now contribute to the material presented at The WebConf 2018!
I'm cochairing the developers track with Thomas Steiner, and we are, naturally, explicitly encouraging non-Paper or more Webby contributions. If the developers track can't do it, no-one can!
Authors should be creative in finding the most effective way to communicate their work, and we welcome dynamic or interactive contributions. Contributions using native Web technologies, or otherwise in a format which exemplifies or demonstrates dogfooding of the technology in question are particularly encouraged.
More details about the submission process coming soon, but we will accept (nay, encourage) a publicly accessible URL pointing to your material, and we will snapshot it at a web archive or download it on the submission deadline. For some ideas and tools for communicating academic work on the Web, check out LinkedResearch.
I'm hopeful we have the option for an open review process. Still working that out.
The WebConf organising committee will hold the copyright over works included in the proceedings, but release it under a CC-BY 4.0 license, which allows ACM to publish their proceedings. We haven't worked this out yet, but I'm hopeful that we can allow contributors to opt out of handing their copyright over at all and release their work under a CC-BY 4.0 license themselves. It might be that we have to exclude these works from the ACM proceedings and publish an alternative proceedings to include these, but we'll see.. stand by.
Today, learning ElasticSearch.
Proud to be joining OCCRP as a contractor for a while to work on data wrangling and software for investigative journalism.
Attending to give a lightning talk about the social web and linked data.
I am officially part of the W3C Team and co-staff contact for the Social Web WG. Look, there I am!
Updated working draft of Social Web Protocols published ahead of the Social Web WG face-to-face next week: https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ This describes and explains the various specs the WG is working on. Far from done, but we're making progress..
Today I finished morph, a client for posting ActivityStreams2 Update activities to an endpoint. The server handles this update activity however it wants, but the obvious thing to do is take the object of the activity and make the indicated changes.
So far it:
name, published and tags to items in a Collection.Will be expanding its object editing abilities soon.
Code on github. See also: Minimal ActivityPub update endpoint.
I finally pieced together my thoughts on the Social API over the last couple of weeks, and yesterday it was accepted as an Editor's Draft for the W3C Social WG. Over the next month or so I'm hoping the group can work together to plug the gaps and reach consensus where there are various alternative ways of doing things so we can have a First Public Working Draft by our next face-to-face on the 1st of December.
I have relocated to MIT for a year to work on my PhD in the delightful company of TimBL, Sandro Hawke, Andrei Sambra, Nicola Greco and Sarven Capadisli. My desk is in the W3C office, and I'm still not sure how I got here.
🔁 https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/618089653418225664
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