MicroFormats

LionKimbro:

What I am about to say is gossipy and resentful, so – take everything I say here with a grain of salt, and please don’t let this distract us from whatever mission we’re on.

That said, it’s on my chest, and it affects my strategic thinking, so I want you to know what I think and feel about this. I definitely do not claim, or feel, that I have the last word on this subject.

My story:

I remember when Microformats was getting a lot of attention.

There were dozens of proposals for microformats, and I thought that these proposals were – maybe most were crude? But I thought they were certainly serviceable, at least, and I remember having the impression that many were excellent. I saw something to work with in just about all of them.

But when people went to publish and share and collaborate over their formats, they were hit with a giant wall – a “process” that ‘’nobody’’ could make it through. I have the memory of seeing a ton of people trying, but nobody was able to go through.

http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-April/000172.html

How long did hCard or hCalendar take to go through the three stages
and make it to the specification stage (assuming it actually went
through the process)?

When was the last microformat to make it to the specification stage
and how long did it take?

Thanks,

Michael B.

The response was:

At the time they were developed, there was no process. The process  
was created as a result of lessons learned while doing hCard,  
hCalendar and hReview.

-ryan

It appeared to me that absolutely nothing not created by Tantec was approved. I may be wrong, but this is my impression looking through the MicroformatsWiki and everything else I’ve seen.

I don’t like this because it seems to me like Tantec created an appearance of “this is this grass-roots thing, and all these people are doing this, and look, here’s we’ve collected the things that the people have made,” and then – it’s all just this one guy, and he’s established these walls to keep out people who want to play.

Then I think that Tantec & co. came up with a concept called “POSH,” to distinguish microformats, the real thing, what they are doing, from what everyone else wanted to do.

I think this was a bad historical decision. People were eager to network and collaborate on microformats – there were dozens of submissions and proposals. But at the center of that collaboration, there was a broad and slow motion rejection of everything that wasn’t created by Tantec. A “process” was created, but everything was stopped at the gate, and nothing could get through.

So by my read of the situation, it jammed everything to a halt. It looked anti-collaborative to me.

Here’s what I would have done instead:

• Establish the microformats wiki as a place to collect the various proposals that people are developing.
• Network people to find related proposals, and collaborate on the tools ecology around that those specific proposals.
• Publish, publish, publish. Make metrics for “how far along is this effort?”, like saying, “This is a proposal,” or “This is something that three tools have been written to support,” or “This is a third draft, and it’s been worked on for N years,” – you can quantify the work and activity and maturity around something. But publish, man, publish.
• Don’t insist on any kind of purity of format; Just focus on what people are doing, where there is energy and enthusiasm, and on tools support.
• See what is working, socially, with time and with people.

OK. So, I have that off my chest, and now, behind me.

I think that using semantic HTML to embed information on a page is great. I think publishing data on the Internet is great. I’m completely behind LinkedData? or NetworkedData? as a concept.

I think Tantec is great at getting people excited about a concept, and getting people together. Leadership, including charismatic leadership, I think is a great thing. I just found him to be anti-collaborative in 2007, and killing the enthusiasm for the effort before it had a chance to really lift off. And maybe the concept is incomplete – it might be worth some time to think about, “What’s actually required to get LinkedData? or NetworkedData? off the ground?

I hope that whatever he’s doing today, (I think it’s IndyWeb? last I checked, an area of interest for me,) is more collaborative.