Archive for the 'Standards' Category

Community and Web 2.0 Social Networking

Published by Ross Gardler on July 21, 2007 in Community, Discussion and Standards. 12 Comments

At the recent International Web Managers Workshop in York I attended a discussion session led by Brian Kelly entitled Building the Web Managers Community. This session allowed participants to discuss web 2.0 social networking tools and their role in supporting a community of web managers in sharing best practice and experiences.

My interest in this session stems from my long history of involvement in sustained open source development using a community led model. In this domain only four tools are needed to facilitate the community:

  • mailing lists (or in some cases forums) – the fewer the better
  • a web site (which may or may not contain a blog but should provide RSS feeds of news)
  • a repository for documentation and, where appropriate, source code
  • an issue tracker to help plan and monitor organised community activity

Despite there being only four tools in this list, a process for their use is vital. None of these tools are of any use without a process describing how the community operates and is governed. None of the communities I have examined in the various social networking sites have such a process, nor such a limited (but highly effective) set of tools at their disposal. This is true of all “social networking” communities I’ve seen, including those set up by people from successful “old web” communities.

Process is critical (note process need only be guidance in the form of best practice, it need not be rules). It is critical because newcomers to the community need to have a very clear understanding of which tools are used for what purpose. Without this process, and without tight control over the proliferation of overlapping tools available to the community, information is spread far and wide. Consequently its exposure, and thus its usefulness, is limited.

For a community to succeed participants must get more out than they put in, so limiting the exposure to useful resources is a major concern.

Since the four tools listed above, coupled with a clear description of their use patterns, have led to the development of highly successful and long lived communities within open source software development. I wonder if we really need more?
It is worth noting that members of those “old web” communities often experiment with social networking tools. I recall myself and many of my Apache Software Foundation colleagues getting all excited over one of the very early social networking tools, Orkut, launched in November 17, 2002. Despite our early enthusiasm, we quickly grew bored of it and returned to our tried and tested tools. Since then I (and many of my peers) have experimented with LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut (again) and a handful of other such, so called, social networking tools. I have to say the functionality, and more importantly, the utility, of these sites has not really changed a great deal since 2002. I still stick to my four base tools within all my real community work.
In addition to the proliferation of tools within these environments I am also highly worried about the fact that these tools are walled gardens. Back in the early days of Orkut there was a hope that it would be the “one and only”, or it would create open standards for all that follow, yet I (and to a large extent we, where the we are existing members of successful online communities) rejected it.

Today it is clear that there are a large number of walled gardens in social networking domain. This is a problem because if I’m not a member of a site, I can’t play with the communities within. Since I don’t want to join and manage up to a dozen different social networking sites I have to pick and choose which I join in with. This is contrary to the a basic principle of a community led development – that everyone is welcome as long as they are willing to play by the “rules”.

If the tools are not fully open with respect to sharing their data across social networks (where permission is granted), then they are no use to my community development work. So again, nothingis compelling me to move away from the tried and tested tools listed above.
This whole “walled garden” mess reminds me of my early days using computers and modems to communicate. First of all I used bulletin boards (reasonably open thanks to Fidonet), then I joined Compuserve (totally closed), but had difficulty communicating with those on AOL, Prestel and others. Then came open standards and the Internet and gradually the walls began to fall. I quickly left Compuserve and switched to newsgroups and email, I’ve never looked back since.

Supporters of online social networking often argue that there are runaway success stories that indicate this is a movement that cannot fail. I disagree. In its day Compuserve, Prestel and many other such networks were a success, but only AOL can be thought of a survivor from these early days. Today AOL is not the walled garden it once was, it has remodelled in order to survive. [I won't even bother pointing at the dot-com bubble and all the "runaway success" stories within it that later bit the dust.]

I predict only one or two of the current Social Networking sites will survive, and they will be the ones that share their network data first.

ITU recommendations available free of charge

Published by Stuart Yeates on April 23, 2007 in Development and Standards. 0 Comments

For a trial period, ITU recommendations are to be available for download free of charge. The ITU has more than a century of experience standardising communication systems and is now a UN body. In the computer world it is perhaps best known for the X.509 Public Key Cryptography and X.1141 Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standards.

It’s great to see the ITU taking steps to make the standards more widely accessible. Hopefully this will lead to an increased take-up and better implementation of it’s great security and privacy standards. Easy access to the standards is crucial to correct and robust implementation, and in the past even relatively low financial barriers to accessing standards may have limited access, especially to open source and academic developers.

Sun loses Java vote amid contractual issues

Published by Stuart Yeates on April 18, 2007 in Community, Legal and Standards. 4 Comments

Sun has lost a significant vote in the Java standardisation process, with the Java Community Process (JCP) document defining the next version of the Java language being voted down by other Java industry players. The key issue appears to be that with the contract for the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). The TCK is used to ensure that all implementations are compatible and that software can be written once to run anywhere, on any implementation of the Java technology on any platform. As it stands, the TCK contract appears to prevent full third party implementations of the Java technology being released under open source licences such as the Apache Licence and the GPL.

The issue came to a head when the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) wrote an open letter and a FAQ to Sun outlining to them frustration at the lack of progress on the issue. Members of the JCP Executive Committee also abstained from the most recent JCP vote. Red Hat, one of the JCP Executive Committee members, hinted that no further JCP vote would be supported until the issue was resolved.

There are some complex issues here, but what is clear is that Sun is being blocked from moving forward with it’s future Java plans by the other Java community members until it does what it has said it would do, and irons out the contractual issues as they relate to open source.

The impact of this on end-users in the short to medium term will be negligible, even if the dispute drags on for years, because the vote was for the next version of the Java language (version 6) and many end-users are only now getting up to speed with the very significant changes introduced by the current version (version 5). The impact on commercial technology partners may be more noticeably, since on-going difficulties with Java would enable alternative languages to increase their gains.

The impact of a resolution to this that allowed full open source implementations of the Java technology would be hugely increased support for Java on open source and POSIX platforms such as Linux, MacOS X and FreeBSD. In the medium to long term these implementations are also likely to prove cheaper and more robust alternatives to some of the commercial Java implementations, saving the commercial players money.

ICANN moves against RegisterFly.com

Published by Stuart Yeates on March 20, 2007 in Legal and Standards. 1 Comment

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which controls such key elements of the Internet as mime types, character sets and the DNS, has taken action against RegisterFly.com, a domain-name registry that appears to be in a protracted financial implosion. In 15 days RegisterFly.com’s customers will have their domain names moved to another register.

ICANN has received been criticised in the past over issues such as internationalisation and governance, but it’s great to see it taking a positive and proactive role in this situation. Hopefully this is the start of a new proactive ICANN, which is in an ideal position to provide leadership on a whole range of technical issues.

The step also sets a new precedent for what happens when Internet companies collapse. In the past most Internet-related companies have been acquired at knock-down prices by their competitors rather than going bankrupt. ICANN’s move effectively strips RegisterFly.com of their primary asset, their customers. The customers’ DNS records (the database records that map a name such as “involve.jisc.ac.uk” to the numerical IP machine address such as “213.133.67.196”) will be transferred to another registrar or registrars, who are presumably spending the next 15 days gearing up for the transfer. ICANN has standardised procedures to allow customers to move either own database records from registrar to another, but RegisterFly.com was not following these procedures (and appears not to have been for some time).

Microsoft, Verisign and Partners to Collaborate with OpenID

Published by Ross Gardler on February 7, 2007 in Access Management, Community, Development, Software, Standards and e-Administration. 2 Comments

OpenID is an open, decentralised, free framework for user-centric digital identity. The goal is to release every part of this work under the most liberal licences possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.

Microsoft and VeriSign, along with other partners, have announced that they “will collaborate on interoperability between OpenID and Windows CardSpace(TM) to make the Internet safer and easier to use. “

What interests me in this announcement is the word “collaborate”. I can almost hear the MS sceptics groaning, but is this announcement different?

OpenID was originally specified without any specific authentication method in mind. Brad Fitzpatrick, the original creator of OpenID, said, “Now people ask me what I think about Microsoft supporting it, using their InfoCards as the method of authentication…. I think it’s great! So far I’ve seen Kerberos integration for OpenID, voiceprint biometric auth (call a number and read some words), Jabber JID-Ping auth, etc…. all have different trade-offs between convenience and security. But as more people have CardSpace on their machines, users should get both convenience and security.”

CardSpace is claimed to provide significant anti-phishing, privacy, and convenience benefits to users. Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain (another of the partners in this agreement), says, “Windows CardSpace is shipping with Vista today and is a well thought-out technology that helps address many of the privacy and security concerns that people have had with OpenID. OpenID helps users describe their identity across many sites in a public fashion. The two together are very complimentary products and each has its strength.”

This looks like a true collaboration between the OpenID community, Microsoft and others. From what I have seen All parties are happy with the deal and there appears to be no evidence of one “side” having to compromise. A true victory for open development? I think so, only time will tell us for certain.

The Freedom to edit Wikipedia

Published by Ross Gardler on January 26, 2007 in Community and Standards. 5 Comments

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, prides itself on the fact that articles are unbiased. This is achieved by allowing any non-biased user to edit a Wikipedia article. The theory is that many eyes on an article will ensure the accuracy of that article. It seems to work too, research published in Nature showed that wikipedia is comparable in accuracy to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Wikipedia team have created a set of guidelines to help ensure that articles are written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). For example, edits from contributors deemed to have a conflict of interest with the central requirement for impartiality will be blocked or removed. So, it is not acceptable for Microsoft to employ a contractor to correct a Wikipedia articles relating to Microsoft’s OpenXML format, yet that is exactly what they have recently done.

Perhaps predictably, Wikipedia have expressed their concern about this move. Apparently the preferred approach would have been to use the discussion page for the article to describe any errors and to encourage an impartial author to correct them.

Microsoft claim that they have tried to flag the errors to volunteer editors, but changes were not made. As a result they felt the need to seek an independent expert to determine what changes were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia.

What I find interesting about this particular case is that Microsoft appear to have approached this in what I consider to be acceptable way. They sought an independent expert and asked them to edit the articles without interference from Microsoft staff. The email to Rick Jelliffe said:

“Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we’d like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections… Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today.”

The e-mail also encouraged Jeliffe to post details of the agreement on his blog at oreillynet.com, which he did. Furthermore, Microsoft also reassured Jelliffe that they did not require approval rights for any edits to the article.

So just what is wrong with this transparent arrangement?

Perhaps Jeliffe is biased towards Microsoft and therefore not an impartial editor. Well, according to his blog, Jeliffe is a Linux user, a Java programmer and dabbles in open source development. He supported the Massachusetts government’s adoption of the OpenDocument format, a competitor to Microsoft’s OpenXML. He also participates in a number of ISO standards, often finding himself taking a counter view to the larger organisations when it comes to standards.

He certainly doesn’t sound biased, yet he is the person that Microsoft chose to employ, and he wants to accept, saying “FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see.”

This whole episode worries me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m far from a big fan of Microsoft, but like Jeliffe I get enraged at misinformation, wherever it comes from.

Is it really so wrong for Microsoft (or anyone else) to pay an independent writer to correct errors without interference from the sponsor?

Open Document Format (ODF) Toolkit Project

Published by Ross Gardler on January 25, 2007 in Community, Development, Software and Standards. 0 Comments

The Open Document Format (ODF) frees the user from vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary formats. The new ODF Toolkit Project will facilitate the creation of tools that allow users to break away from the legacy constraints office suites.

The ODF Toolkit Project, aims to enhance the ability of OpenOffice.org to be used as a programming framework as opposed to a desktop application. That is it will provide a means for developers to reuse OpenOffice.org code to enable their own applications to create and process Open Document (ODF) documents.

It gets better too, thanks to OpenOffice.orgs use of Universal Network Objects (UNO). UNO offers interoperability between programming languages, object models and hardware architectures, thus developers will not be limited to any particular language or hardware for their own projects.

So what will you be able to do with the ODF Toolkit? The ODF website outlines a number of target case studies, these include:

  • Semi-Automatic and Automatic Document Creation
  • Collaborative editing
  • Format converters to/from ODF
  • ODF Workflow Modelling

It’s early days, for this project, but there are solid foundations from the start. I currently use the OpenOffice.org suite to allow integration of proprietary formats in Apache Forrest. It works really well, but having to use the complete office suite is a bit cumbersome. This toolkit project should solve that issue.

So, if your current project needs to produce, manipulate or consume office documents head over to the ODF Toolkit Project and help make it a success.

Complaint to the European Commission over BECTA procurement process

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 9, 2007 in Standards. 1 Comment

Alpha Learning has complained about the procurement process for the BECTA eLearning platform to the European Commission Competition Commission. Unlike other complaints I’ve written about previously, this appears to be from a proprietary rather than open source vendor.

The gist of the complaint appears to be that BECTA treated some “mandatory” interoperability requirements as optional but other “mandatory” requirements as compulsory. The interoperability requirements in this case relate to the SCORM open standard. Open standards such as SCORM are, of course, central to fostering a genuinely open market in eLearning area, both for the software platforms and the educational content they contain. Without open standards, open source and open content are likely to be restricted in this area by vendor lock-in.

We can expect to see more eLearning news during the BETT Show, which starts tomorrow.

Criticism of ECMA-376 (Microsoft Office Open XML)

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 5, 2007 in Standards. 0 Comments

Rob Weir has posted a criticism of ECMA-376, the official standard name for Microsoft Office Open XML, the new XML standard based on the Microsoft Office file format.

The core of his criticism is that parts of the standard are defined, in terms of 12 or 16 year old pieces of software which are no longer supported, let alone sold by their vendor. Any third party implementation of ECMA-376 requires a reverse engineering of these pieces of software and duplicating of their behaviour, a technically challenging process which appears to be of dubious legality (I’m not a lawyer, but see “Contract case could hurt reverse engineering”).

Looking at the standard myself, another flaw becomes apparent: from a software engineering point of view the standard is a nightmare to implement and may be impossible to test against.

At 6039 pages the standard is huge, and rather than being as close as possible in presentation style to the standards on which it builds (a common and very useful trait among the IETF, W3C and ISO sets of standards), it bears little or no relation to the structure of the standards it builds upon (the W3C standards for XML).

Certain classes of testing against the ECMA-376 should be easy, particularly XML conformance and validation, but testing for the correct behaviour of applications is going to be next to impossible, particularly when the behaviour is specified as (example lifted from Rob Weir):

2.15.3.51 suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing)

This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) when determining the resulting spacing between lines in a paragraph using the spacing element (§2.3.1.33). This emulation typically results in line spacing which is reduced from its normal size.

[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]

To be frank, I don’t see how even Microsoft can reliably test against such a standard, let alone third parties. That inability to test will inevitably undermine efforts at reducing bugs.