group-brainstorming

Group Brainstorming

This page is for brainstorming about ideas, proposals, constraints, requirements for a Groups microformat.

Authors

• Chris Messina
• Josh Peek
• Tantek Çelik

Problem

See Chris Messina's original thoughts on microformats-discuss.

Not every page belongs to one user. We need a microformat to define a group of people.

There are two distinct problems here though.

The problem that Chris's proposal describes is actually just one of tagging. By tagging people with the same tag, you "place" them into a group as defined by that tag. That's the model presented by Chris's ASCII art diagram.

The simpler problem to solve is perhaps the Group equivalent of XFN

How does a person indicate that they belong to of a group?

How does a group indicate that a person is a member of that group?

Purposed Structure

From Chris Messina's original post

--Group Name
  | Description
  | Tags
  |
  +--+ Members
  |  |
  |  +-- Member 1 (hcard)
  |  |
  |  +-- Member 2 (hcard)
  |
  +--+ Pool
     |
     +--+ Topic
         |
        +-- Post 1 (hatom)
         |
        +-- Post 2 (hatom)

Add optional roles. Groups may have "admins", "moderators", or "members". Or if you were marking up a contributes page, you could have "programmers", "designers", etc.

Real World Examples

• microformats | People - Contributers to a project should be marked up.
• Ma.gnolia Groups
• Flickr Groups

Possible Implementations

Groups could define there members on their own homepage. Social web sites could pick up the group list from the groups site instead. You'd instantly have your group on every (dreaming) social web service.

See Also

• hcard
• XFN