Evan Prodromou

2024-12-06 20:27:55

New Charter for the W3C SocialCG

I want to draw attention to an administrative process at the W3C Social Web Community Group (SocialCG), the standards group that manages ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 and a number of other open social networking standards. The group is considering a new charter to define how decisions are made and how the members work together. This might seem like a minor process, but it’s actually part of a bigger deal for the Fediverse. To see why, you need to understand the structure of the W3C.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is the standards organization that specifies the Web platform, like HTML (kind of), CSS, and RDF. It also is the organization that standardized ActivityPub and AS2 in 2019. The W3C process requires a special kind of group, called a Working Group, to create official recommendations on the part of the organization. Working Groups can have members nominated by the W3C member organizations, as well as some Invited Experts.

The W3C has another structure, called a Community Group, that’s much looser. Anyone can join a community group, as long as they sign the Contributor License Agreement, which grants a copyright and patent license to the work they do with the group. Community Groups don’t produce formal recommendations in the W3C; they can produce Community Group Reports, which can be documents, software, or really anything.

So, the Social Web Working Group created and edited ActivityPub and AS2 back in the mid-2010s. The group had a charter that extended into 2018; it was extended to early 2019 so the work on ActivityPub could be finished. The working group was then disbanded. A new Community Group, the SocialCG, had been started in 2017. It took over the process of supporting new extensions to AP and AS2, as well as maintaining the errata for the two main documents. Importantly, it can’t make major changes to the documents themselves — that requires a working group.

The experience of developers and users over the last decade in using ActivityPub has pointed out some real needs for updates to the documents. The W3C staff have asked the SocialCG to draft a charter for a new working group that could make backwards-compatible changes to these documents — adding clarifications, and possibly including new features. This would be great for the specifications, great for the Social Web, and great for the Internet at large.

The problem is that there isn’t a clear relationship between the boundaries of the new working group and the boundaries of the community group. What input would members of the community group have in the editing of the updated ActivityPub documents? Especially given that W3C members tend to be more commercial and institutional than the mostly Open Source developers who work in the SocialCG, there is a concern that a new Social Web Working Group would prioritize the needs of corporate developers with lots of resources, at the expense of Open Source devs making code for small communities.

The answer we’ve landed on is to implement a stage process, in which new ideas are initiated and documented as Community Group Reports before the Working Group takes them up for possible inclusion the main recommendation documents — or becoming new recommendations on their own. This process has worked well in other Community Groups at W3C, and the W3C staff is really supportive of it.

One problem with this process for the SocialCG is that we never adopted rules for how we make decisions when we started the group. We agreed casually to use the same consensus-based mechanisms we’d used in the Social Web Working Group, but never put together an official charter for the group. This casual structure has worked well for a long time, but in order to set up this more formal staging process, we need to have a more formal decision-making process.

The good news is that the norm in the W3C, as in most Internet standards organization, is to use consensus-based decision-making. So, the new SocialCG proposed charter has a lot of casual consensus, too, as well as pretty open participation on a very peer-oriented basis. It’s about the minimum structure you need to have a long-running organization.

So, let me recap: we want updated, backwards-compatible versions of ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 with more clarity and maybe even new features. In order to get those, we need a Working Group. In order to get that, we need to establish a stage process. And in order to adopt the stage process, we need to have a new CG charter. So: CG charter leads to stage process leads to WG leads to new specs leads to new features.

The Community Group intends to consider approving the new CG charter at its January 2025 meeting. So, people interested in ActivityPub, standardization, and group dynamics in general are invited to review the documents and submit GitHub issues or comment on existing issues. If you’re not already a member of the SocialCG, you can join in a just a few minutes. It’s also reasonable for non-members to comment or make suggestions.

This work is complicated, but it’s also fascinating, and it is an exciting part of putting ActivityPub on a solid footing for the future.

Issues · swicg/potential-charters

Discussion of potential CG and WG charters. Contribute to swicg/potential-charters development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub