Restarting the Social Web Working Group

[plehegar]

New charter proposal, reviewers please take note.

Charter Review

Charter

What kind of charter is this? Check the relevant box / remove irrelevant branches.

• New

• New WG

Horizontal Reviews: apply the Github label "Horizontal review requested" to request reviews for accessibility (a11y), internationalization (i18n), privacy, and security. Also add a "card" for this issue to the Strategy Funnel.

Communities suggested for outreach:

Social Web CG.

Known or potential areas of concern:

lack of consensus within the Community on the scope of the charter.

Where would charter proponents like to see issues raised? (this strategy funnel issue, a different github repo, email, ...)

For now, in the Social Web CG.

Anything else we should think about as we review?

[plehegar]

Notes:

• We may not need a Working Group
  • Are there any subtantive changes needed for the ActivityPub W3C Recommendations?
• Social Web WG or ActivityPub WG ?
• Maintenance-only or allow new features?
• Make it an umbrella WG around a CG?

[plehegar]

See also https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/WG_Charter_Discussion#Deliverables

[gobengo]

@plehegar noting that at this time there have been two contributors to that document

[plehegar]

[[
Note: If there is no Working Group chartered to maintain a Recommendation the Team cannot make substantive changes and republish the Recommendation. It can, however, informatively highlight problems and desirable changes using errata and candidate corrections and republish as described in the previous section.
]]
From 6.3.11.3. Revising a Recommendation: Substantive Changes

[AramZS]

There's a lot of activity around what used to be the Social WG's maintained recommendation, presumably that would indicate that there is interest in more active maintenance from a broad set of participants. The potential spec work listed is quite large and many of those could indeed use more active work.

[capjamesg]

I support the creation of a WG. There are several changes to be made to the ActivityPub specification that would require a WG. I thank @evanp for leading work as editor, and to the broader community -- particularly those involved with FEPs -- for helping to advance discussions on how ActivityPub can be improved.

There has also been interest in potentially working on jf2, Micropub, rel=me and IndieAuth. Any inclusion, however, would require an active editor (or, for larger specs, multiple editors) who have already worked on the specifications and can lend their expertise to the group.

I would prefer we have a single WG. I think we can work better as one group rather than managing cross-group communications, and we could have more social web experts in one place to support each other.

I have heard several concerns about new features in ActivityPub in particular but I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether AP should be allowed to have substantiative amendments in a prospective WG. With that said, a lot of work has been done on Micropub and IndieAuth that may introduce new functionality. If that is the case, I think denoting, by spec, whether the spec is in a "maintenance mode" or allows for larger changes would be beneficial. Thus, we could have ActivityPub in maintenance mode and IndieAuth, for example, in a more active editing mode.

I invite CG members (participation is free) to contribute to the prospective WG charter wiki page, where we are collating thoughts for a charter. This page has been sent for distribution across the mailing list, published on the w3.org website and mentioned in meetings. I would love to see more people help us advance these discussions! (The wiki page is a forum for brainstorming and does not represent any final position of the group.)