2015/Brighton/indiemark

 IndieMark, indieweb.txt  was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2015.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/indiemark

Related:
 * indieweb.txt
 * for the indieweb.txt directory section below, see indie-stats
 * IndieMark

IndieMark is a set of metrics for measuring the indieweb-ness of a site, and a step-by-step  approach to incrementally adopting indieweb features on your site. IndieMark helps us as a community measure our progress both individually and collectively.

Increasing levels of 'indieweb-ness', from the core requirements (owning your own domain, for sign-in, and publishing posts) up to integrating own content with conversations on external sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Assessment of own IndieMark score is a somewhat manual process, though see http://indiewebify.me/ which provides automated checks for individual items. Assessment can be done by checking the requirements on the reference document (http://indiewebcamp.com/IndieMark) against own implementation/indieweb site.

Several axes along which one can advance their IndieMark score - from the reference page:

IndieMark is a multidimensional rating/ranking system for evaluating the IndieWebness of a personal site. Thus there are different axes that one can advance along. This section documents each axis (or feature area) and what incremental  improvements can be made to each (including how each contributes to what  level).

Suggestion: "quirky axes": some people may want to describe their own IndieWeb involvement across other axes too.

indieweb.txt
Proposal for a common location where an IndieWeb site owner can post information about:
 * IndieWeb tools they are using
 * IndieWeb 'strategies'
 * IndieMark score (and potentially details of 'compliance' with each item within each level)
 * notes on relevance of IndieWeb to personal web life (why one is embracing IndieWeb strategies, etc.)

Inspiration:
 * robots.txt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard)
 * humans.txt (http://humanstxt.org/)
 * The Setup: "A nerdy little interview website, asking people what they use to get stuff done" (https://usesthis.com/) - source code available: https://github.com/waferbaby/usesthis/

Motivation:
 * Sharing information on tools and practices across a growing movement
 * Self-reflection: personal motivation to review one's own IndieMark occasionally

Implementation:
 * Could be a free-form text file
 * But ideally should at least have some basic structure (like robots.txt or humans.txt)
 * Shouldn't probably be at a fixed, hardcoded location - a rel link tag could probably be used (e.g. 
 * Suggestion: point to multiple structured resources describing tools/strategies/IndieMark 'compliance'
 * Suggestion: see RingMark (http://rng.io/) - both in terms of running automated checks and of visualizing in a very intuitive way the level of compliance
 * Suggestion: extend the advertising items to include API endpoints to interact with the site (e.g. to post content, replies, etc. - this is mostly covered by existing strategies, but could be useful for ad-hoc API===ints)

indieweb.txt directory
Proposal for a simple API to advertise publishing and updating of indieweb.txt resources on individual sites

Like The Setup, but automated and not storing the actual content but just the list of IndieWeb sites that have advertised (or withdrawn the advertisement of) their indieweb.txt resources

Motivation:
 * Promote discoverability and sharing
 * Help foster a sense of participation to the movement
 * Making the movement visible (could be associated to badges - not necessarily visible ones but at least machine-parsable)
 * Spreading information on best practices
 * Highlight evolution of uptake of specific tools/practices and the evolution of the IndieWeb movement itself

Implementation:
 * MVP: initially, simple central server-side app with minimal API to publish/update/revoke indieweb.txt advertisement?
 * Later, some distributed database?