Re: Split off ActivityPub CG or WG

It's nice to see someone out-doing me in the caution department! I was 
starting to worry I was the outlier.

On 13/10/2023 10:31, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Although Evan's primer is going to be a very useful input, we need 
> more docs like this, and ability to compare notes.  And it's going to 
> take 6 months to 1 year to get the tooling in place, namely a 
> test-suite.  And possibly a FEP for the maintenance update in parallel.

I hesitate to predict (much less set) timelines for parallelized 
interdependent packages of work being done by people who are not 
dedicated employees of a single company. It could take a year to get 
stable and complete tooling in place, but I'm hoping for a lot less than 
that. It'll be a lot easier to have reasonable estimates both for 
feature-completeness and for post-feature-completeness consensus once 
the testing TF has met a few times and started collaborating more 
deeply. I sincerely want these things to go faster, and I'm trying to 
work ahead on the consensus part early so that the gap between 
feature-complete testsuite and uncontroversial, consensus-backed 
testsuite is as short as possible. Almost none of this is up to the 
cat-herder, though, it mostly is up to the cats.

On 13/10/2023 10:31, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> When we reach a point where the docs and the tooling, and the proposed 
> maintenance items are agreed upon by the whole ecosystem, that's 
> probably a good time to charter a WG and update to perhaps AP 1.1 and 
> AS 2.1.

I think I was proposing something very similar with a slight semantic 
difference: work on tooling and docs is already happening in the CG, and 
a "maintenance-only" WG could be working in parallel on a slate of 
errata and fixes that is still mutable until ratified anyways.  If that 
small group:
1. wants to work with a clear mandate and space to think deeply in 
relative peace and quiet
2. still has a healthy feedback loop with the brave souls working on one 
or more test suites, and
3. still holds off on declaring victory until it has a test suite and 
buy-in from implementers (W3C process already requires this),
then all of these processes might be neatly parallelized and unblocked, 
and all are still gated (at the end) by consensus in a way that prevents 
mishaps.

The only distinction between PAC's proposal and yours is that if we have 
a minimal, "placeholder" charter in the meantime, rather than no 
charter, onlookers less familiar with W3C process minutiae will be 
reassured that "progress is being made" and we have a little more 
upfront accountability not to drag this out longer than needed. 
Reassuring those onlookers (our superiors, funders, and families among 
them) that real progress is being made and supported and recognized, and 
offering up some modicum of accountability publicly, are both gestures 
that could help most of us get funding from our respective sources: 
teams in big companies can dispel medium-term anxiety in an economic 
downturn year (maybe even moving out of R&D budgets and into product 
budgets), teams in small companies can reassure investors, grants are 
easier to justify, etc. It's a tiny semantic distinction which buys a 
lot of peace of mind for the people currently volunteering to do these 
various kinds of difficult, thankless, almost always underpaid labor. 
Maybe a decentralization hardliner could call it a deal with the devil, 
but if so, call me Dr. Faust because I'd like to unblock everyone 
volunteering to do heavy lifting with the minimum number of upfront 
commitments that we might later regret.

I hope we're zeroing in a plan with few objections? Happy to keep these 
threads going for weeks if needed but I think lots of people are 
starting to ask for shorter emails that concisely express deltas to 
consensus 😅

__the fudge

Received on Friday, 13 October 2023 10:26:05 UTC