Talk:LEAP activity

How to use this
Clicking on the + allows you to enter a subject/headline. Edit the section if you want to comment on the same subject, click on + to start a new subject. Please do put ~ after your comment. Simon Grant 20:06, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Identifying people
Its hard to avoid this one. We have an "author" and "others" here. Are these described, or identified? Inference is certainly possible for the author if its part of the sharing mechanism (e.g. the activities are entries in an Atom feed, and the feed element has an author element and a self-reference URI).

One of the things I'd hope to avoid if possible is replication and possible unintended disclosure of other people's details in my own descriptions of my activity.

FOAF is obviously quite strong here with its inverse functional properties to assist in people identification and transclusion of other people's FOAFs rather than replication. OpenID, LID, and YADIS use URLs for identification and things like the OpenID Simple Registration Extension enable requests to be made for basic biographical information of users.

Some more things

 * Identifier: Some means of identifying this statement about an activity.

43 things "I've done this"
Scott agreed that this was a goal rather than an activity, so I've removed it from the activity page. It should probably reappear when we do goals and/or achievements.

"Usually associated"
(Moved here from the page, 24 December 2006)

--Adam 17:30, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Who I did it with

Duplicate of "Who else was involved..." above... --Scott 09:09, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, for the purposes of sanity, lets consider a single concept to be at the right level of generality. I was seeing "did it with" to be an active association (like being a member of a football team or project group) and "was involved" didn't strike me in the same way (went to a concert with 5000 other people). --Adam 09:28, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

"usually associated" taken quite liberally and thinking of what might normally appear in a narrative in day-to-day representations of activities. --Adam 17:30, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Activity groupings
I think the major uses for this can be reasonably though of as part-whole relationships: what lesser activities were part of a greater activity. Allowing this (as LUSID does, incidentally) also avoids the problem of duplication when one lesser activity was a part of two or more greater activities. For example, a year of study abroad as part of a degree can be seen as part of one's degree course; as part of one's employment or work experience; and as part of one's "living abroad" activity.

Scott wrote:
 * How the activity fits in with other past/present/future activities. This could be an idea of a set (e.g. the woodturning I did) where the sequence in time doesn't really have a parallel in my purpose or could be a sequence of courses leading in a concerted way towards something like a goal...

OSPI uses categories to group similar activities, e.g. "Employment History". Elgg has tags for grouping entries. PebblePad has something that groups abilities, but not activities. The combination of categorization of activities plus date information could generate this representation; however I haven't seen this concept actually presented in this way in a system as such.

I've changed this in the main text: please discuss further here and/or amend the text itself. Simon Grant 05:30, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

activity and accomplishment etc.
I object to the term activity in this context it seems incorrect if not ambiguous.

I think that an activity is used to define things you can do as part of say PDP or a Qualification or will do...[the act of doing something] not the record of something you have done.

I'm not sure the term activity is the correct term for something one has done what about something like "accomplishment" instead of activity so we techies have an easier job mapping?

I'm not sure experience and activity map at the same level, wheras accomplishment at least relates as an experience type... failure of course could be another experience type with a named activity...

Perhaps if experience had sub elements; accomplishment, failure...other...? so perhaps we should ask ourselves... is experience the high level record element with sub elements like accomplishment, failure etc because activities are very specific things we do which help us or others assess / measure accomplishments, failure and so on. Climbed Snowdon "Climbing" "Walking" "Reading a Map" -- Selwyn Lloyd

I realise how much past discussion needs to be revisited here. Sorry I didn't make this plain before.

The concept of an activity is quite distinct from an achievement or an accomplishment. Because we are representing these in terms of information, the information components are vital to distinguishing which is which. Fundamentally, things like achievements, accomplishments, etc. have only one date, the date on which they were achieved. Activities, experiences etc. have a start and a finish. The example above isn't quite clear in what it is trying to represent. If it was a particular instance of climbing Snowdon, alias "Yr Wyddfa", there would be an activity with a start date(/time) and finish date(/time). Particularly if reaching the top of Snowdon had been a previously recorded goal, reaching the top would be the achievement, which would happen at one particular time. This approach works, and has worked in LUSID for many years.

The things listed as "activites" in the XML snippet above could be tags, they could be competences - as they are they are just labels and there is no way of knowing what they are meant to represent. If nothing else, they are textual tags, which can serve to link together any portfolio items, not just activities.

One thing one has to realise is that people are often unclear about what something is when they note down a text label associated with something. There is a strong case to be made for helping people to clarify what it is, so that they can benefit from the related clarity of representation.

Simon Grant 10:42, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Status etc.
Bearing in mind the assertion that the discussion here says that activities could be past, present and future...

I raised the point about "experience /> accomplishment /> activities" based on an assumption that the case for exchanging interoperable LEAP was based on things done [past tense]. not things to do [act of doing].

Since it seems the discussion of activity suggested we might need to interoperate in terms of a data set which defines "things to do" or "things in progress" then here is another thought...

Might I suggest we need some clarity in terms of flagging what is done? to do? being done?

A kind of progress / status flag... [not sure systems like Pebblepad, Elgg, ioPortal want to exchange this kind of data between respective portfolio / pdp / social systems but I can see a usefulness within those systems and the enterprise on which they might reside. A kind of local interoperability if you like.

Also, what of recording partial achievement? Is this different to recording the status of an actvity if the activity is complete? (I'm not sure what a partial achievement would look like - Simon Grant 20:21, 5 January 2007 (UTC))

I can offer as an insight, we do record status in our own PDP / portfolio/ social activity based system ioPortal, so we would find this a useful concept.

Perhaps there are also business / use cases to exchange / transfer the status of a project or bigger picture plan such as a mission [read goal]

[I use the term "mission" in this illustration as a throw away, not a prospective LEAP element, it might be goal or some other such term]

mission: "become rocket scientist"

mission: status "started"

mission: activities "degree in math[complete 08092001 1st], masters degree in physics[awarded 07072003], attend rocket club[done|recurring], get job as a scientist for rocket manufacturer[applying]"

The status of individual activities is important when logically trying to define the overall progress of an accomplishment say as a percentage.

In this case of a longer term goal/mission perhaps we do need to be able to exchange status of LEAP elements and more than one element type would benefit from a status flag.

Can I also point out that we talk of both experience [past] and on going experience [present/future].

In conclusion wrt status etc... since we humans talk of planned activities, active activities and previous activities, I think its important for systems to be able to exchange and developers to be able to flag status / progress in relation to an activity. I remain unsure if we as a community want to record and thus exchange / interoperate with this kind of dynamic information with something LEAP 2.0?

Selwyn Lloyd posted 12:14 then edited 17:45, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'd say if we do have a status flag as part of a spec, it would need to be absolutely universal and not dependent on usage. I do think there are just one or two universals about actions: first and foremost, the distinction between future and hypothetical ones (counted together), ones in progress, and completed ones. I'd guess that features in every plausible model of activity covering future and present as well as past. The point could be that one might want to maintain records of activities which were planned but never carried out. While definite reasons for this are a little far-fetched, there is a definite need in terms of record maintenance. Activities that have been planned should not automatically turn into completed activities simply by time elapsing, without the intervention of the principal. That is necessary to allow effective operation with calendars, diaries and so forth. Simon Grant 20:21, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is even possible, as the status of "completed" is itself a product of process. In one system, this means "user filled in form clicked Submit", in another "activity was evaluated by interview with supervisor", in another "user asserts completion". Its safer, in terms of avoiding semantic gaps, to declare these as categories rather than a vocabulary with some sort of assumed universality. There is also a clash here with "started" and "ended" which convey similar meanings to these status values. --Scott 11:07, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Tags for activities
I'm not clear about whether tags belong in metadata. It seems to me that if a tag is to be useful, it needs to refer to more than one thing: therefore it has an existence independently of the particular activity. If we considered tags as links to the "real" tag, I think that might work, whether the "real" tag was defined by the individual or defined publicly. We do then have to consider how to represent tags for LEAP 2.0. Simon Grant 20:28, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Geographical or organisational location
This seems to me to be a tricky and vital question. Many of the things that people will want to represent as (complex) activities will be periods of employment. Often, employees with multinational businesses travel or relocate frequently. If we stick to a geographical location, one option would be to list the registered office of the business, but I think that would be misleading and inappropriate. Another might be to miss out the location unless it is able to be specified somehow. Another approach would be to use an organisational link as an alternative to a geographical location. But this conflict with the good principle of listing the organisation separately, and having a relationship between the activity and the employer organisation. Or should we, on reflection, not have location as part of the basic details?

Which approach seems most natural? Simon Grant 11:23, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Breaking down a so called activity
Name Of, Participant(s) In [other fields?],  Description Of, Where it occured [recurred],  When it occured [recurred, dates], Status of, Evidence of [skill competency proficiency], Tags [relational key words]

Selwyn Lloyd 11:08, 10 January 2007 (UTC)