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Today at O’Reilly’s OSCON, David Recordon announced the formation of a new foundation, the Open Web Foundation, with the goal of fostering development of open standards and providing an incubator for working out IPR and patent issues before standards are too widely deployed.

The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

This is an awesome step and one that has been necessary for a long time. The Apache Foundation has provided a great model for software incubation, but to date there has not been an appropriate place to work out issues with new specifications. The Open Web Foundation will provide that place.

The OWF has a mailing list up for anyone wanting to get involved or follow the discussion. Details on foundation membership, etc, are still forthcoming but knowing the participants I’m certain things will be aboveboard.

I’m really excited to see the OWF come together - the environment in which web technologies are developed has changed, and the OWF is there to help provide a buffer for these new specs to be developed out in the open. As I wrote in Web Green: Cultivating The Open Web:

Like sediment in a river, or potting soil in a greenhouse, each layer we put down supports and affects the ecosystem that grows out of it. We take IP, ethernet, and their like completely for granted - they’ve been standardized and implemented across a worldwide network. That layer is foundation and fertilizer for the next: HTTP, SSL, HTML, XML, and the feed variants that have become the everyday building blocks of our applications and services. These are now settling into the foundation for the services we’re building now: near-real-time publishing and social software stacks. These, in turn, will provide for what comes after, and the philosophical foundations we build into this layer will profoundly affect the health of the next.

So here’s to the OWF: May the foundations of the next web be as open and implementable as the foundations of the first web were, and more.

grass image from pygment.com for whose proprietor I cannot find contact information.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about what’s going on in the DiSo community, and I had started to prepare a list of recent developments to share, but on the way I felt that there was a theme I wanted to address first.

The DiSo Project is first and foremost about enabling/creating a new category of social-networking-enabled websites, not restricted to the large silos but grown organically at the edges of the web - the small and independent sites that are the forerunners and foundations of the communities we now enjoy. How can we best provide a fertile environment, one that encourages, protects, and nurtures this growth?

grass image from pygment.com for whose proprietor I cannot find contact information.

Fertile Foundations

One theme that’s been cropping up on the conference circuit lately, thanks to Chris Messina, Dave Recordon, Jeremy Keith, and others, is this idea of “building the open web“. The internet (based on public, open technical standards), and the early www (based on public, open hypertext formats and protocol specifications), gave “the web” we know its heart and soul. How did that happen, and what will perpetuate the process?

Like sediment in a river, or potting soil in a greenhouse, each layer we put down supports and affects the ecosystem that grows out of it. We take IP, ethernet, and their like completely for granted - they’ve been standardized and implemented across a worldwide network. That layer is foundation and fertilizer for the next: HTTP, SSL, HTML, XML, and the feed variants that have become the everyday building blocks of our applications and services. These are now settling into the foundation for the services we’re building now: near-real-time publishing and social software stacks. These, in turn, will provide for what comes after, and the philosophical foundations we build into this layer will profoundly affect the health of the next.

Building the Open Web

So for the next ecosystem of social and community applications to thrive, we need to make sure that these aspects - public, freely-implementable formats and open standards - are a part of the web as we know it now. Thankfully, it’s happening - witness the growth of open, enabling technoliges like:

• Microformats, basic specs for marking up machine-readable data in human-readable web pages (XFN, hCard, hCalendar, hAtom, hEtc)
• OpenID, open identity solution for web services
• OAuth, an HTTP-based protocol for authentication between services
• XRDS-Simple, which provides discovery for various web services and makes inter-app cooperation that much easier.
• XMPP, a real-time, distributed messaging system that can be integrated into other services.

All these are publicly developed and freely implementable, and active communities have evolved around them to discuss, implement, and evangelize them. This is what building the open web is about: collaborating to build a web that is larger than any company or organization - a web that will encourage new growth.

New Growth

So, given all the effort we’re putting into creating a web that is fertile ground for what’s coming next… what’s coming next? Here’s a look at a few areas DiSo is focusing on as we work on the building blocks of the distributed social network:

Identity

OpenID has focused a lot of attention on putting the User’s online identity back under their control. Rather than maintaining an account on each and every site they use, the User can maintain one or more OpenID accounts, using them as credentials on any of the 10,000+ sites that accept an OpenID for registration and login. With the technology in place, we turn our attention to what identity means, how much of that identity we’re willing to share, and with whom.

Activity

Since the mid 90’s we’ve been working on the problem of how to track what our friends and contacts are doing online, and figure out where the stuff that’s really interesting and relevant to us is happening. Look at the social network silos, and you’ll see that a huge part of what they offer users is the ability (or at least impression) that the user can know what their friends are up to. Sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are making progress on bringing this activity tracking into the light, but to really distribute it all there’s still a lot of work to do.

Here at the edges, we’re making it easy to agregate your own activity, and working on ways to track/follow updates of your friends activity in near-real-time.

Messaging

With OpenID providing a common form of identity, we’ve begun looking at what services can be enabled using that endpoint. One of the services we’re exploring is distributed messaging - friend requests, subscription requests, and direct messages - directed to that endpoint, authenticated via OAuth, and filtered by a messaging service based on user preferences.

Cultivating the Open Web

As the builders - or growers - of this web, it’s our responsibility to look beyond the IPO, beyond the ad-sell, beyond the current crop of buzzwords. We must decide that we’re going to invest in, and give back to, the ecosystem that has supported us. Think of it as Web “Green” - protecting and nurturing and stewarding the web ecology.

This started out as a post to the diso mailing list, but drifted.

Open Source, Product Design, and DiSo

Wherein Steve looks at two small reasons why Facebook “works” and what that means for the inside-out social network.

I wanted to put out some thoughts this morning about an aspect of DiSo that we haven’t touched on a lot. This is, in some ways, a response to Chris’s most recent post, The problem with open source design. But this isn’t really about design per se.

Of course, it was 3 am and I was up to get a drink, and decided to check Google Reader… I saw Chris’s post and was awake for another 40 minutes thinking about it - open source, DiSo, and product design.

Facebook and the “Big Lebowski” Effect

My wife just signed up on Facebook because she got an invite from a friend. It happened to be up on the screen when I went to check Reader, and I had to admit, once again, that Facebook really “hangs together” well. One reason Facebook works is because (as the silo that some of us are eager to get out of) there is a real focus internally on visual and funtional consistency, on design. Unlike MySpace, Facebook does not allow for personalized home/profile pages, so users know what to expect on most any profile page - an attractive interface with common components in .

I call it the “Big Lebowski” effect (”That rug really tied the room together.”). DiSo is facing a fundemental challenge here: as a decentralized system, how do we provide the sense that it is “tied together” by something? This is important to real users and should be important to us.

Chris has a tip:

Be clear about the problem you’re solving. Nothing spells disaster for a design process more than fishtailing. If you don’t know what problems you’re trying to solve and you don’t have razor-sharp focus on it, chances are you’ll be open to whatever feedback you can get your hands on, grasping for some notion of what the hell you should be working on.

Facebook and the Shared Experience

That “tied together” feeling also creates in Facebook a shared experience between its users that adds to the sense of comfort and community. Members use a common interface and share applications, a flood of news updates, application messages, and “pokes”. It can get overwhelming, and requires constant “care” to keep up. But everyone is doing it, and the churn is another shared experience that keeps members coming back.

Ideally, DiSo will give users more control over their social interactions, but as we work to solve the thorny “distributed” issues, let’s not forget the “social” ones. My wife has her own Wordpress blog and thinks DiSo is a great idea - but to be really useful to her it has to maintain that fun, social quality while adopting the distributed/self-determined model.

Recommendations for moving DiSo forward

Ok, I’m on thin ice in the practical “what to do about it” section, but here are some ideas (in no particluar order). I’d love to get feedback, and we’ll be discussing this on the list as well.

• DiSo needs some visual/process design: Some facets will be influenced by the host platform (i.e. Wordpress) but others should be consistent across platforms so that uses begin to be able to identify DiSo-powered sites by more than a 80×60 pixel badge.
• A common profile page: subject to some theme-matching CSS, there should be a common profile page generated by DiSo. “My DiSo Profile” should be hosted on the user’s blog but should be recognizable to any DiSo user as what it is - representative of the author’s connection to the DiSo network.
• Some branding: I don’t want to create another club - quite the opposite in fact. But there is value in being able to clearly communicate what you’re on about and branding gives you a hook to hang that on.
• We need to work on groups in the DiSo-verse. Chris and I have been brainstorming on this and hopefully one of both of us will have some time to write up our thoughts on it soon. Being able to say “I’m a part of such-and-such group” is a powerful statement of self-ideation, and it’s one that I for one want in DiSo.

Thanks for reading - if this stuff is interesting to you, come join us on the mailing list and participate!

I can’t remember if I posted about this when I put up the “On This Day In…” widget, but I finally got my widgets (both On This Day In… and the hCard About Box) into the public monkinetic widgets repository. Browse the repository here.

My two recent widgets, hCard About Box and On This Day In…, are now in the public SVN. Have at it.

The hCard Wordpress widget now it’s own page. GPL and MIT licensed. Enjoy.

Chris Messina posted an exploration of the whole open source v. open services conversation. I’m going to respond here in the near future, but wanted to point to it while it’s fresh in my mind.

I have 6 or 7 blog posts waiting to be written, responding to Chris’ post is just one of them. sigh.