Old directions in social media.

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Following on from John K.'s post and some others, I think it is about time
that the community took a hard look at some technology from the dawn of the
Web, Hurwitz and Mallery's Open Meeting which they ran for Vice President
Al Gore in 1994:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Open-Meeting%3A-A-Web-Based-System-for-and-Hurwitz-Mallery/78ebaf0432c105113b68675d86368c0b111c3a3e

As with many technologies (e.g. threshold cryptography), these ideas came
before the audience was ready to absorb them. A similar effect was seen in
early film. Only after the basic vocabulary of motion picture signs such as
establishing shots was understood, could film progress to more complex
narratives. The reason Facebook, a very late entrant in the social media
wars could win them (for a time at least) was that the audience had
progressed to the point where it could consume the technology.

I have seen groups trying to use git and I really wish they would stop.
Using git to run a WG provides a small amount of tool support for issues
tracking which is useful. But the tool is designed to do a very different
job and has its own bizarre vocabulary. Telling people to enter comments as
'Pull Requests' causes most people's mental gears to grind. The result is
WGs whose activities are unhappily split between a Web site and a mailing
list with no cohesion between the two. My conclusion is that for this
approach to work, there has to be a purpose written tool that absorbs the
lessons from the github experience and provides a means of following the WG
from the mailing list as well. (Which is how the open meeting worked.)


What Mallery and Hurwitz developed was a discussion forum in which comments
were organized according to a constrained vocabulary of moves that provided
a set of lightweight semantics allowing topics to be efficiently navigated.

Facebook's reaction emoticons provide a similar capability except that they
are replacements for comments rather than labels for comments. Also, since
the objective of Facebook is to maximize engagement, only positive
reactions are permitted. It is not possible to disagree (except by posting
haha to laugh in their faces). What we need most for our work is
constructive criticism. The type of comments that get us to the next level.


I still have about a month worth of effort on the first phase of the Mesh.
The second phase will include an online comment forum allowing people to
comment on the Mesh specifications. For this particular purpose, the
comment forums will of course be open and unencrypted. But part of the
point here is to provide a demonstration of the Mesh technology which
allows the discussion to be end-to-end encrypted. So a group of lawyers
working on a case could upload the case files to a cloud service and
comment on them secure in the knowledge that the cloud service provider
cannot read either the documents or the comments. Accessing end-to-end
encrypted social media will of course require a specialist client, the non
encrypted version can be presented through a Web browser interface in the
same way that Facebook, Twitter, etc. are commonly accessed.

Different types of discussion will require different sets of lightweight
semantics. For example, a forum serving a replica prop building community
(e.g. dalek building) might have semantics such as 'original', 'plans',
'techniques', etc. Someone who is going through the source video capturing
images might tag them 'original', someone who has converted that material
to plans might tag their images, plans. etc. etc.

So what is the difference between this approach and a hashtag?


There are two major differences. The first is that since hashtags come from
an infinite vocabulary, there is inevitable variation in use. Forcing
people to pick from a small number of tags makes those tags more useful as
search terms.

The second difference is process. consider a strawman IETF forum.

A forum consists of a set of documents. Each document has a status (active,
inactive, published). A pre-WG activity has a statement of scope. A WG
activity has a charter. There are also drafts, RFCs etc.

It should be possible to scan through a document and annotate individual
paragraphs with comments tagged with lightweight semantics such as:

agree
disagree
nit [typographic issues, spelling etc.]
vocabulary [use/choice of defined terms]
requirement
use-case
interop

The open meeting vocabulary was limited to six moves. It is possible that
we could make use of a slightly larger vocabulary. But it is probably best
to start out constrained and add slowly.

The process part comes in when an editor is creating a new version of the
document. We might assign an editor a separate set of moves:

accept
reject
assign-issue

So if I am editing a document and someone has given me a list of typos, I
just go through and clear them. But some comments might well require more
discussion. And we can write rules that identify those comments.


Anyway, that is what I plan to build for the Mesh. If other IETFers wish to
apply the same technology, I am always open to collaborators. At this
point, I have the majority of the components that I need to build this
tool. In particular I have the document preparation tool that accepts
either markdown or Word as either an input or an output.