Re: WG Scope

Sorry for top-posting.

It would be lovely if we could have someone do a video summary of the
charter and charter issues so we can get a quick overview and ready
reckoner of whats going on rather than trying to get context on a lot of
issues and the charter itself.

Aaron

On Fri, 28 Mar 2025 at 11:04, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> pá 28. 3. 2025 v 9:40 odesílatel Bumblefudge <
> bumblefudge@learningproof.xyz> napsal:
>
>> Hey chat, what's the timeline on these charter proposals?  I remember
>> hearing something about "the end of March" which is... Monday?
>>
>> I would like to ask one last time for anyone reading this to take a
>> glance at the open PRs
>> <https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/pulls> and issues over the
>> weekend, and comment on any PR they don't understand or have feelings
>> about, with hopefully lower stakes than an on-call +1/-1.  Next week (I
>> presume?) the chairs [+PLH?] have a meeting about next steps before our
>> next whole-CG meeting.  It feels like a very small subset of the people who
>> have spoken at meetings about scope have been +1ing and commenting in the
>> potential-charters repo, and none of the "notes-readers" from the broader
>> community; I suspect that people might be putting off this odious,
>> tax-filing-like chore for lack of clear timelines and deadlines (one of my
>> shrinks called this "plausible avoidance" and I never recovered from the
>> insult). Would a definitive deadline for new PRs help? Could it be...
>> sunday midnight server-time? In other working group contexts, I've seen an
>> explicit social contract that "any issues not closed by a PR get resolved
>> unilaterally by chairs" after the PR deadline, which I fear might happen
>> here for lack of more time for deliberation...
>>
>
> Great to see this work moving forward. Just a quick note that charters can
> sometimes take several years to complete — the original SWWG charter, for
> example, had over five years of input from the XG and other sources, and
> involved a substantial amount of work.
>
> A quick glance at the repo suggests it may be a stretch to finalize
> everything by the end of March.
>
> That said, I’ve heard (though I could be mistaken) that the W3C has kindly
> offered to assist in drafting the charter for the group.
>
> If that offer is still on the table, it might be worth taking them up on
> it, while continuing to provide input based on the current draft.
>
> Just my two cents.
>
>
>>
>> Anxiously consensual,
>> __juan
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 4:06 PM Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks! It'd be especially helpful to get feedback from Christine and
>>> Tantek on this.
>>>
>>> I hope that it balances Tantek's expectation that the Indyweb stack
>>> recommendations would be in-scope for the WG, with Christine's concern for
>>> not overloading the WG with too much work at any one time.
>>>
>>> One question for Philippe: is it acceptable to leave the scope open like
>>> this? That is, the WG will maintain all of the recommendations that came
>>> out of the (first) Social Web Working Group, but without a specific
>>> delivery date for the next version of each one?
>>>
>>> Evan
>>> On 2025-03-24 6:57 a.m., Bumblefudge wrote:
>>>
>>> Hey Evan:
>>>
>>> Thanks for pushing on this, I heartily agree that however the WG(s) get
>>> scoped, it is crucial to stagger and manage parallel work openly and
>>> publicly. I opened a PR that I hope speeds up discussion on this kind of
>>> workflow mechanism, and will extend it to the other proposals once I've
>>> gotten some feedback, approvals, and/or competing PRs! The clock is
>>> ticking, though, so timely review would be appreciated from the CG.
>>>
>>> Hastily,
>>> __juan
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 21, 2025 at 8:19 PM Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I added an issue to the potential-charters repository with a proposal
>>>> for managing scope for the WG:
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/issues/83
>>>>
>>>> I think we should consider *all* the Social Web Working Group
>>>> recommendations as in-scope for the new WG, but let the new WG set its own
>>>> schedule and prioritisation for maintaining those documents.
>>>>
>>>> I think this would balance the need to maintain all the existing
>>>> documents on the one hand against the limited time and attention of the
>>>> working group on the other.
>>>>
>>>> As an example of how this could work (and *not a proposal for an
>>>> actual work schedule, please do not at me*), imagine that, almost
>>>> immediately, the workgroup starts with these document revisions:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>    - Activity Streams 2.1 (core and vocabulary) - incorporate errata,
>>>>    improve clarity
>>>>    - ActivityPub 1.1 - incorporate errata, expand media upload, define
>>>>    replies maintenance, etc.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> As this work winds down, and these documents move into the final stages
>>>> of recommendation, the WG might take on more work:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>    - WebSub 1.1 - errata and clarifications
>>>>    - LOLA 1.0 - define LOLA
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> (Again, this is just an example schedule. I don't know if WebSub needs
>>>> a 1.1 update or if that's the highest priority change.) As these were
>>>> completed and moved into PR and TR stage, the group might then take on
>>>> additional streams of work:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>    - Activity Streams 2.2 (vocabulary) - expand vocabulary with new
>>>>    terms
>>>>    - ActivityPub E2EE Messaging - example of new functionality and new
>>>>    document
>>>>    - Micropub 1.1 - errata
>>>>
>>>> In this example, the WG is keeping a healthy and productive 2-3
>>>> parallel document pace, but is still covering multiple documents over the
>>>> period.
>>>>
>>>> The WG could set its own heuristics for initiating new work, such as
>>>> having N editors for each active document; having N chairs per active
>>>> document workstream; staging work initiated in the SocialCG; community and
>>>> implementer demand; and so on.
>>>>
>>>> I think that as a more mature WG doing iterative updates to existing
>>>> work, with occasional extensions to that work, it would not be under the
>>>> same time pressure as the previous Social Web WG was. If we want, we can
>>>> set more healthy and realistic expectations for deliverables, and still
>>>> take responsibility for all the docs published by the previous Social Web
>>>> WG.
>>>>
>>>> Evan
>>>>
>>>

-- 
Aaron Gray - @AaronNGray@fosstodon.org | @aaronngray@threads.net |
@AaronNGray@Twitter.com

Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher and
Designer, Amateur Type Theorist, Amateur Computer Scientist,
Environmentalist and Climate Science Researcher and Disseminator.