Socially-aware Web

Solid Symposium, Leuven, 2024-05-02

Sarven Capadisli https://csarven.ca/#i @csarven

The Web is inherently social, decentralised, and for everyone. This talk navigates through Web's core principles and architectural concepts, emphasising both social and technical challenges, with a focus on Web standardisation and implementation efforts within Solid.

• 1987: Commodore 64 (mostly games, typed in BASIC code to play snake 🐍)
• 1991–1994: got into ☎️ Bulletin Board Systems (initial online interactions 💬)
• 1994: got parent's signature ✍️ to use city's FreeNet 🕸️
• 1994–2006: random computing and school stuff 💤
• 2006–present: open standards development ⚒️ (mostly in W3C Groups)
• 2008–2010: decentralised + federated social web / status updates (StatusNet)
• 2010–2019: academic stuff (Linked Research on the Decentralised Web ✊)
• 2012–present: spite/fun-driven application development (dokieli)
• ?
• Profit?!

All of man’s artifacts – whether language, or laws, or ideas and hypotheses, or tools, or clothing, or computers – are extensions of the physical human body or the mind.

• 👂 – ☎️ 📻
• 👀 – 📄 👓 📺
• 🚶– 👟 🚲 🚗 🚀
• 👋 – 🔪 🧤
• 👂👀 – 🕸️ – 🏙️

Axiom 0a: Universality 2

Any resource of significance should be given a URI.

Axiom 2b: identity

the significance of identity for a given URI is determined by the person who owns the URI, who first determined what it points to.

URI ownership is a relation between a URI and a social entity, such as a person, organization, or specification. URI ownership gives the relevant social entity certain rights, including:

• to pass on ownership of some or all owned URIs to another owner—delegation; and
• to associate a resource with an owned URI—URI allocation.

URI allocation is the process of associating a URI with a resource. Allocation can be performed both by resource owners and by other parties.

We are tasked to fix the Web, society, or something? Right… easy peasy.

• What (future) are we building?
• Is it safe, responsible, and ethical?
• Who/what might actually end-up controlling stuff?
• How can we balance public and private identities, anonymity, meronymity, ..?
• What are the ideological and technology traps?
• How do we improve the flow between research, development, .. reality.
• Can we make it so... before our AI overlords takeover; biodiversity collapses; societal collapse?

• Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One (AWWW)
• Ethical Web Principles (EWP)
• W3C Community and Business Group Process, W3C Process Document
• W3C Solid Community Group Charter
• W3C Solid Community Group Contributing Guidelines

• Security Considerations
• Privacy Considerations
• Accessibility Considerations
• Internationalization Considerations
• Security and Privacy Review
• Societal Impact Review

How about Web Sustainability Guidelines?

DecisionsStandards are made by those who show up.

But.. it is a privilege to have the opportunity to show up.

---

NIH 🙈 🙉 🙊 FUD

"My standard/tool/idea can beat up your standard/tool/idea..."

Standards are like wine: some will age well, and others spoil. — Henry Story

Adoption in the wild takes time and influenced by many variables.

• Standards evolve;
• shaped by cooperation;
• adherence to principles (process, consensus, transparency, balance, openness);
• collective empowerment;
• availability;
• voluntary adoption.

“Is it done yet?”™

• Reports are designed to allow an easy way for innovation by individuals.
• Put user needs first (Priority of Constituencies).
• Use cases, implementation experience, commitment to implement?
• Seek review, listen to social/technical doers, practitioners, researchers.
• Information flow (skewed? overloaded? blind spots?).
• Antipatterns: uninformed/casual comments, non-commitment, withholding knowledge, architecture astronomy, behaviour without Group consensus, commonswashing?

• How can harassment and abuse be prevented or handled?
• How would moderation or civil discourse work?
• How can a resource prohibit or consent to be annotated at fine granularity?
• How can the conditions to annotate and notify be indicated and monitored?
• How can a resource’s annotation policy and rules be respected?
• What may be the conditions to associate different identities?
• How can domain expertise be factored in?

self publishing entails that an actor can register identifiers for their content, shape and store data where they have access to, set access control[s], and use preferred applications to achieve them.

The Official Solid Bingo

🙈	🙉	🙊
Social (Web)	Decentralised	Control
Process	Standards	Publish
Access	Verticals, Horizontals, Diagonals	AI

• Abide by community guidelines, processes, code of conduct.
• Share use cases.
• Eat your own cooking: build what you need and use it.
• Highlight emerging patterns, share implementation experience.
• Identify gaps in standardisation.
• Host storage/nodes for public good.
• Self-publish research, reviews, data...
• Use your privilege for common good.