Re: Where to coordinate WG work?

I would prefer as much communication to happen in a publicly auditable
way, wherever feasible. So to me, this means the following are
preferred:

- public-socialweb@w3.org mailing list, archived at
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/
- #social on irc.w3.org, archived at https://chat.indieweb.org/social
(possibly elsewhere)

Discussion related to specific work items is probably fine to use the
specific GitHub repos for those work items.

If a Slack is to be used, it should be bridged to the IRC room. I'm
not personally fond of Slack, though -- it requires an account
registration for something that might otherwise not be used for
anything. The barrier to entry is lower for email and IRC, and GitHub
is otherwise relied upon heavily for W3C work, so those feel more
justified. I understand that IRC can be perceived as daunting, but it
is an established communication channel with associated benefits and
affordances.

A similar argument could be made for Matrix, although my thoughts
there are that the Matrix user experience is somewhat frustrating even
with the "official" clients provided by Element (including the newer
Element X). I've had issues with things as simple as sending text
messages, because the composer sometimes exhibits significant jank;
also, the unread indicators have a habit of getting stuck in the
unread state.

I don't have an issue with crossposting announcements or discussion
threads to something like a NodeBB category, but I don't think it
should be an official channel, and should instead be purely elective,
at least for now. Speaking of federated social media platform
accounts, there is https://w3c.social/@socialcg which is ostensibly
managed by the Social CG chairs, but seems to not be actively used in
all of 2025 or 2026 so far.

In summary, I think the communication policy should look something like this:

- Official communications SHOULD go to the mailing list.
- Work-item related discussions SHOULD go to GitHub repos.
- Ad-hoc communications aimed at group members SHOULD go to the mailing list.
- Ad-hoc communications allowing public participation MAY go to IRC or fedi.

Received on Wednesday, 11 March 2026 04:02:38 UTC