I've been pondering whether the Active Affiliation serves any specific purpose for some time, having talked briefly about this subject before.
The Active Affiliation Element was intended as a kind of state-object that connected devices would acquire to indicate that the connection was authenticated. Devices that possess a View would then use their Active Affiliation to form a Clique with their serving Agent Device. Other devices that did not receive View information from the serving Agent Device would acquire Participants when engaged with relevant other devices in Clique Space, otherwise devices would possess a lone Active Affiliation when not engaged with other devices in any collaboration.
Now that I'm developing the concept, my understanding of the relevance of each of the pieces shifts and one consequence of this appears to be that I'm being drawn to the conclusion that the Active Affiliation is redundant, and the Participant can take on the intended 'authentication' purpose of the Active Affiliation implying that media spines might only have three vertebrae: the Media Profile, Connection, and Participant Elements. The serving Agent Device's Participant and the bipartite Clique in which both Participants exist, is generated for all devices -- the mode of which differs with the type of device and what state information it exchanges with the serving Agent Device through which the device is connected to the Clique Space in question.
All this leads more directly to the convenience, or rather, the very point of Clique Space: Cliques model collaborations. And because every device has to "collaborate" with a serving Agent Device, at a minimum every device must form a Clique with its serving Agent Device before any View or log-based device can observe this collaboration and discover other collaborations this device might be involved in which are being modelled (and possibly controlled) by the Clique Spaces over which their Cliques span.
Now, my proof-of-concept has been evolving for some time. While the removal of the Active Affiliation from the core data model will ultimately simplify the implementation, this procedure is to going to be messy. Obviously, I'm going to consider this issue for some time yet while other issues are worked through.
