Re: Should the specs be forked and maintained elsewhere?

I agree that regular meetings would be a good idea, but I don't think the
specs necessarily need to be forked to be maintained, even though they're
in TR status and don't see active updates. Very few suggestions have
been made about actual practical improvements to the spec—the vast, vast
majority of open Github issues are usage questions that have been
addressed. Regarding the FEP process, while it has generated a lot of
productive discussion, it's less clear to me that it's been effective at
generating multi-implementor consensus, which is in my mind the most
important goal of a specification workgroup. I'm not aware of any currently
active FEP that got discussion from multiple implementers and then went on
to have multiple interoperable implementations.

Previously, the Community Group spent a lot of effort discussing and
working on "outreach"-focused initiatives that didn't move the ball forward
on technical integration. I think that's also a serious mistake that we
made in the past that we should learn from going forward. To my mind, what
we need to call a meeting is a concrete agenda of technical topics and an
actionable plan on *what* implementers or organizations are going to put in
the work to explore them or move them forward. We can't move forward as a
specification body without implementer buy-in and consensus.

I'm aware of implementer interest from Mastodon relevant to a few of the
topics I can see discussing: Reply approval, Groups. What other specific
technical topics do people feel like should end up on the agenda?

On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 6:56 PM Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:

> Regular meetings would be great.
>
> On Mar 21, 2023, at 5:25 PM, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> 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
> <https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/should-we-fork-as-ap-specs-to-codeberg-create-vnext-drafts/3022>
> that I've seen was made in one of the forums on the ActivityRocks site.
>
> 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 <https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues> on ActivityPub's
> GitHub repository and 58 open issues
> <https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/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?
>
> 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?
>
> bob wyman
>
>
>