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October SocialCG Meeting 2024-10-04

Archived:

https://meet.jit.si/social-web-cg

Present

Agenda

  1. IP Protection Note Reminder:
  2. Introductions & Re-Introductions
  3. Community Announcements
  4. Social Web CG Charter discussion (see: swicg/potential-charters#1 )
  5. CG to WG Work Items Staging Process discussion (see: swicg/potential-charters#4 )
  6. Potential Working Group charters discussion.
  7. (If time) Location task force proposal (Mike, Jeremiah, Evan) from Fediforum session
  8. Group TF
    • Rigorous definition of Group/Join/Leave/members/inbox/outbox etc.

Minutes

  1. Intros
  2. Community announcements
    • Darius: Open Standards advocate inside the Harvard Applied Social Media Lab. Applied Social Media lab is interested in hosting convenings related to decentralized social media / SWICG kind of things. Also will be sponsoring Darius's work on the Social Media Schema Observatory.
    • IndieWeb Berlin! has organized and opened up tickets for the event. Tickets are complimentary, two day barcamp type unconference and hackathon for all things independent and social web. Excited to be in Germany which is a hotbed of social web activity, will be hosted at Mozilla Berlin.
    • Social Web Foundation: Evan is now working with SWF with the goal of improving the network and also the user experience. Not yet a W3C member but will be soon; for now, Evan is participating as individual.
  3. Social Web CG Charter discussion
    • Group has had great momentum in the last year but we need to make sure we have a charter
    • swicg/potential-charters#1
    • Evan: when we started the CG we still had the Social Web Working Group, when we started the CG we said "it will work [handwave] like the WG does". But that was 5 or 6 years ago. My question is what kind of timeframe are we hoping for in this discussion and approval?
      • Dmitri: anywhere between 2 to 4 weeks is my propsal, what do people think?
      • (discussion)
      • CG charters do not require W3C approval (probably)
      • Proposal: accept PR #1 as the basis for collaboration on building a charter
        • Outcome: Resolved
        • Bumblefudge (in chat): i think the important part is to make significant progress EACH OF THE 4 WEEKS on the various PRs so that next week we MIGHT be ready to ratify haha who wants me to PR on their behalf can just tag me in their issue
    • Evan: how are the WG and CG charters going to be related
      • Bengo: if we can use the CG charter as a platform which we can agree on high level WG goals, it will make everything easier
      • Bob Wyman (in chat):PRs work for coders, but given that this is "social" web, perhaps we should use Issues, which are easier for non-coders. Or, provide a "PRs for Dummy's".
        • Tantek (in chat): or file an issue?
        • Bumblefudge (in chat): yeah issues are pretty user-friendly. anyone
    • Emelia: how does this relate to the question of who the editor(s) for the spec is(are)?
      • Dmitri: the typical editor/chair selection for a WG is W3C staff appoints chairs, chairs appoint editor, based on community feedback generally. I would like to make this explicit rather than implicit for both the CG and the WG via elections. W3C has now set up a voting mechanism for members and held elections for one WG so at least there is precedent. For editors maybe a similar voting mechanism?
      • Emelia: on the voting procedure, I was involved in the Solid one. There was a comment from someone on the forums who was unhappy with how the Solid election went, there was a perception that Inrupt carried lots of weight and won a lot of board seats. Virginia ran as an independent without Inrupt supporting her so it's important to note that while she was Inrupt affiliated, she did not represent Inrupt. We need to be clear whether a person represents an org, or whether they are independent regardless of org affiliation, and hold them accountable to that.
      • Tantek: corporate capture is a concern, and in our community we are highly sensitive to that in ways that other communities are not. Seems unlikely that we would let it get to that place, or that it would occur. For example I don't expect Mastodon folks change behavior from the past several years and suddenly show up and attempt capture, or another risk others have expressed is Meta showing up and attempting capture, and to be clear I have seen no sign of it, raising it because it is a concern that has been voiced. In my experience I don't see it happening. May want to consider if we need guardrails against any one company doing something like this.
      • Laurens: the presence of guardrails would support the legitimacy of the CG
    • Tantek: regarding choosing editors, we have so much work to do that whomever steps up to do the work ends up driving it, do-ocracy style
      • Emelia: counterpoint to Tantek's "those that can do, do", these tend to bias toward those who have the social and economic power to do so. BIPOC may not have the funding and availability to work on this stuff. Do-ocracy tends to favor those who already have social power.
      • Tantek: strongly agreed with Emelia's concerns and support active inclusiveness in our efforts. one thing groups have done to mitigate potential harms and enable more inclusion is accept and support co-editors on documents, allowing one editor to take a break if things come up, like when life happens as we say in the IndieWeb community, allowing a co-editor to keep things moving for the group.
  4. CC to WG item staging discussion
    • Dmitri: we have an opportunity to adopt a process. You may be familiar with TC-39 and the way they work. They have created a living language that they add features to continuously. Partly due to tooling like babel, but also due to their governance. They have a very good working process of here's how to propose a feature, identify a champion, and bring it through various stages to acceptance. We have a PR here with a proposed process (direct link to rendered doc: https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/blob/01bc8a9463d36513f79b2e36cbd8896fc7da360d/stage-process.md)
    • (much discussion)
    • plh: the staged approach implies that the CG is able to make decisions. We need a charter for the CG to be able to do that. Since this staging process involves a Working Group, this process must be approved by a Working Group. So we need charter for the CG and a chartered and existing WG to really make this work.
    • Evan: proposal that we accept PR #4 to begin work on a staging process for CG/WG.
      • bumblefudge: WG as mentioned in the proposal is not necessarily a Social Web WG, maybe a different WG if it's related to cryptography or something else
      • Emelia: can we include FEPs as a more formal part of the process here? Some encouragement to use processes we have already voted on
        • Tantek: the staged process should at least mention existing processes (FEPs etc.) and how we intend to work with them.
      • Tantek: I reviewed the diffs from the FedID proposal and I agree with many of them, great work. But changing the "small features" description to "small decisions" would bite us badly, that's not what stages are for. The whole point is a way to grow and test and mature new ideas, rather than stage every small decision. We need to be able to make many small decisions in quick succession, for example the success of Evan's ActivityPub triage sessions, imagine if we had stage each decision made in every one of those sessions. (bumblefudge: agree, please open a PR)
      • resolved to merge PR after the requested changes from Tantek (small features vs decisions) and Emelia (more explicit mention of previously voted up on processes)
    • RESOLVED: Accept PR#4 to begin the collaboration on a staging process for CG/WG (conditional on Tantek and Emelia's change requests).
  5. Potential WG charters
    • to be discussed next meeting