Comment by seabass-labrax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seabass-labrax | Hacker News Reader

If you like what the W3C is doing for the privacy, accessibility and openness of the Web, you can become a W3C participant. Upon finding a W3C Working Group[1] to which you think you could contribute, you can send an email to the address of that WG's 'Staff Contact' explaining how you think you could help. If the Chairs and the Staff Contact agree, they will ask you to join as an 'Invited Expert' (IE). This does not confer voting rights but grants you access to the meetings, relevant Git repositories etc. You'll need to sign a licensing agreement allowing the W3C to freely publish your contributions.

I say this because, at first glance, it seems like the only stakeholders with any influence are W3C Members. The reality is that W3C is very open to contributions from individuals, but just has had a constitutional framework that makes things slightly more complicated for individuals, a situation which they are deliberately improving.

As for myself, I'm an IE for the W3C in the Linked Data area, so whilst of course I do not speak for the W3C, I would be more than happy to answer questions here on HN about how the W3C works.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/

Back in 2014 I met with Tim Berners-Lee himself, and his SoLiD team, and proposed to join forces. Here is the pic: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Rp4Su5Z2h28vCASKfrbhYKrULG...

His team lead (Dmitry Zagidulin) liked what we were doing a lot. But ultimately Tim chose to go in a different direction, spun off "Inrupt" and left MIT. We continued building our open source platform to try to realize the vision he keeps writing about: https://theconversation.com/tim-berners-lees-plan-to-save-th...

I was writing very similar things, but of course I didn't invent the Web: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

Ultimately, my point is that we tried our best. I even hired Dmitry when he left Tim's project for a while, but very quickly Dmitry got demotivated to work with us because we were putting out working code for customers, instead of conforming to standards. Back then I argued to him that we don't have a ton of funding and executions matters more, after which the winners can help spearhead the standards. After all, Twitter pioneered oAuth, and Meebo+Google pioneered xAuth (if anyone remembers that). Dmitri and I did.

So we went our separate ways, and I realized that standards are an expensive detour that can work if you have extra funds to hire people. We plan to support Matrix, Mastodon and other interoperability. But for the time being, our platform is "just" free and open source.

Whether it's the UBI "movement", or the decentralized web, or other initiatives, everyone seems to go their separate way and it fizzles out (e.g. https://decentralizedweb.net and https://indieweb.org/). I wish people were willing to join forces on projects more, and get each other funded. That's how we can build real open source alternatives to the corporate internet we are all forced to depend on.

W3C and IETF standards are aspirational wishes that vendors routinely violate or ignore with intent or by buggy code. It's the responsibility of all ethical engineers to:

0. seek out appropriate, minimum friction standards before reinventing the wheel

1. refuse to implement solutions that harm users

Thanks for your interesting response. Although I don't really want to admit it, you are right in some cases that "standards are an expensive detour", because I've been involved with one of those myself! On the other hand, when the object of standardisation is very clearly defined, eminently possible and widely usable, a consensus-backed standard can be made very rapidly indeed.

Data canonicalisation is one such example: although the idea has been around for quite a while, a couple of years ago lots of people spontaneously decided it was something they needed (myself included!), and here we are with RDF canonicalisation[1] nearing Candidate Recommendation not even halfway through its WG's charter, along with several mutually independent approaches also in a good state of development. The result of this is that in about one more year from now, software developers will find cryptographic verification of data considerably more consistent, which can be translated into a pretty significant boon for Web users.

The ideal timing of a standard is surely after the limits of the idea have been found by theorising or prototyping, and before anyone with that idea has a large enough commercial interest in it to benefit from a monopoly on it. Trying to build a monopoly first and then 'donating' it by spearheading a standard is a viable technique, but it feels risky to me unless you can be sure that you're really the only party who understands the idea, and so won't be overtaken by someone with equally monopolistic but less altruistic motives.

I think that a good place to start is limiting the scope of a proposed standard very consciously, unless as you say you have the funds to hire everyone you need to implement it entirely at least once. Although I'm not familiar enough with your project to comment on any details, I suspect that most social network or forum applications could implement one way ActivityPub or Matrix support easily, and also proper two-way federation unless the original software makes too many assumptions about identity.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-canon/

What project are you referring to?

I can’t tell you, I promised @dang I would mention it very rarely :)

I would like to suport the W3C Line Mode Browser. It still compiles on the present-day computers I have; I use it from time to time for the nostalgia, to remind myslef how fast computers and the internet have become.

That's good to hear because I really wanted to join one of the more recent groups that were formed about a year or two ago, but I didn't make the open invitations in time. Figured the door was closed but I've thought about reaching out to offer.

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