Date/Time/Location

• Date: Friday, September 4th, 2009
• Time: Starting ~noon (Pacific)
• Location: Stanford, CA, USA (Gates Computer Science Building, Room 100)

Please RSVP: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4391625/

Tentative Agenda Topics

Below are some potential agenda topics

• Process for locking a implementors spec and continuing evolution in "working branch"
• Review implementors spec. Finish
  • Context: Mood/Location/Annotation
  • Place
  • Review
  • Replies
  • Events
• JSON representation do we follow OpenSocial , Portable Contacts or Atom
• How to uniquely identify status updates
• Gaming activities
• Beyond polling
  • Publish API suggestion? (ex: HTTP POST with ASms <entry>)
  • Potential high capacity push, ping, or stream models - ffSUP, PSHB, RSS Ping, Twitter Streaming API, others?
• Forum topic as activity object-type?
• Supporting activities mapped from OpenSocial applications with no knowledge of AS.ms
• Forwarding and resharing — is in-reply-to sufficient? (i.e. retweet API changes in Twitter, Status.net)
• Identifying recipients of activities — whether in the case of @replies, or adopting the model of PuSH (PubSubHubBub).
• ... Other suggestions?  Please add...

Attendees

• Monica Keller
• Rob Dolin
• Chris Messina
• Ryan Boyd
• Kevin Marks
• Jyri Engstrom
• Jerry Cain
• John McCrea
• Joseph Smarr
• Adina Levin
• Dmitri Volumann
• JR Conlin
• Martin Atkins
• Phil Wolff
• add yourself...

Meetup Notes

Below are quick notes from the meetup.  Please add/edit.  Thanks.

• To meet the dual goals of having a stable spec to point potential implementors to, we will call the next draft "Draft B"(with "Draft A" referring to the earlier version that Facebook's Activity Stream matches) but we will continue moving spec work forward towards a "implementors draft" that documents actual implementations
• Suggestion: identify spec "unit tests" that we want to have towards an implementors draft.  Action item --> Joseph and Rob to draft wiki page
• General consuses: use <atom:category> for textural tags or categories (like those used by WordPress).  See examples posted by Adina.  Note that some <category> elements are already used to identify activity types so a unique schema would need to be used for tags or categories.  Action item --> Martin to update spec
• Suggestion: There is interest in textural "annotation" from a user when the publish an activity.   (ex: the user's comment on a movie on Netflix as distinct from a summary of the movie's plot.)  There was broad discussion about an <activity:context> element containing mood, location, and annotation or if these should be seperate units.  There was much disucssion but no full consensus.  Action item --> folks should add examples of these to the wiki and we should review/discuss at the next meetup; Kevin created a page for mood
• Reviews were discussed and will be added using <thr:in-reply-to> as a container to refer to the item that was reviewed (option a).  Ratings will be incorporated into reviews, but not necessarily in the next spec draft.  Action items --> Martin to update spec; {don't remember} to draft rating wiki page
• Target and in-reply-to - During the discussion of reviews, there was clarification that <activity:target> is intended to be used for a container (ex: photo album or list of reviews) but <thr:in-reply-to> should be used for an object to which an activity refers (ex: comment or review referring to another object.)
• Place - There was discussion of intent for a "place" <activity:object-type> should include text elements represent place title and place street address.  At this time, it was suggested that we use Portable Contacts schema as children of a place <activity:object>.  See "location" further below for action item
• Gaming - Suggested verb additions: buy, sell, give, challenge; Suggested activity-object additions: virtual good.  Action items --> Rob: update gaming wiki page; add wiki page capturing early gaming brainstorming; Phil: add group activities to brainstorm page
• JSON - disucssion of how to represent ASms in JSON.  General desire to map schema elements and not necessarily Atom.  Action items: Ryan and Kevin to draft proposal on wiki; Rob to add info on RSS 2.0 mapping
• Representing comments on an activity inline - there was discussion of how to represent comments associated with an activity.  Proposal is to include these inline in the <entry> element within a <ae:inline> element.  Action item --> Martin to update spec
• Activity duplicates or "echoes" - Discussion highlighted two key cases/flows here: ingestion of an activity and outbound push/publish of an activity.  There was discussion of various potential options, but nothing solid.  One suggestion that will be written-up is including canonicalized status text in the <atom:content> elment of a "note" <activity:object>.  Another interesting aspect of this is that even if one representation of an activity was first, another "echo" may have more comments. - Action item --> Rob draft brainstorm (on wiki) of how potential consumers might use canonical status as an imperfect solution
• Open Social - There was discussion about how to represent less stuctured OpenSocial activites like <actor> did something in App.  Action item --> Ryan and Monica to draft proposal on wiki