Re: Should the specs be forked and maintained elsewhere?

On Tue, 2023-03-21 at 17:25 -0400, Bob Wyman wrote:
> I've seen several suggestions that, due to inactivity in this group,
> it would make sense to fork either or both of the ActivityStreams and
> ActivityPub specs with the intent to develop them further and
> maintain them elsewhere. The most recent suggestion that I've seen
> was made in one of the forums on the ActivityRocks site.

(With the pre-text of my two answers below), moving it to the forum
wouldn't be the sole answer. We'd need a place to hold the revisions of
said standards. Does the forum (or the organization behind it) have the
capacity to do so? How would such a standards body operate with the
W3C?

> My personal feeling is that the proper forum for maintenance of these
> W3C specs is within this community. Am I correct? However, I
> sympathize with others who feel that maintenance is simply not
> happening. There are now 55 open issues on ActivityPub's GitHub
> repository and 58 open issues on the ActivityStreams repository. Who
> is responsible for addressing those issues, closing them, or taking
> action on them? What is the process by which these decisions will be
> made?

Who has the "commit bit" to that
repository? https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/graphs/contributors 
points to a list of people who've contributed to it - are any of them
in here and are willing to take a more active role in doing so (and if
not, relinquishing that to someone else)?

> Other W3C groups that I've worked with have regular Zoom or Jitsi
> meetings to discuss issues. Why doesn't this group ever have such
> meetings?

IIRC those meetings are either opted by volunteer efforts or by the
chairs of the community. If we want that, all that needs to be done is
for someone to propose some days, another to take minutes and another
to faciliate such meetings with agendas.

That's the how. The "why" can be .... social.

> 
> bob wyman
>