Re: AS2/AP tasks for a chartered social web working group

On 19/09/2023 09:38, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
> There have been multiple high profile formal objections to this item 
> in the past, including from the former chair of the SWWG.  Highly 
> controversial items put a charter at risk, so we should avoid that.  
> Let's stick to ActivityPub, ActivityStreams and fediverse in general.
Sorry but I fear this^ might cross the line into confirmation bias, on 
top of putting words in tantek's mouth. If I recall correctly, tantek 
did not object to the idea of a W3C WG defining export formats or 
interoperability mechanisms, he objected to the demonstrability of 
interop and the economic modeling of its decentralization claims being 
guaranteed by that spec 
<https://www.w3.org/2021/09/21-did10-minutes.html>, i.e. its readiness 
to be a full W3C standard in its current form, which is not the same as 
W3C calling for DIDs to be wiped off the face of the earth or declaring 
key-based identity interop harmful to software everywhere. "Highly 
controversial" is gilding the lily; if anything is controversial, it is 
not DIDs themselves but the DID *WG* and the mismatch between its 
outputs and W3C norms and timelines.

Furthermore, I completely disagree that an AP or SW WG is at risk of 
being rejected for /failing to promise not/ to use any draft, final, or 
future outputs of the DID WG. I'd need to see some citations there, and 
would rather not make CG decisions based on hearsay or opinions that 
most of the stakeholders to this decision have no way of confirming 
(most of us can't just ring up TAG members and ask).

If anything, I would argue the opposite risk is more substantial: 
imposing limitations on what implementers can experiment with in their 
spec extensions could well make many CG implementers suspicious that the 
WG effort is motivated by W3C insiders deciding for the whole community 
which extensions are valid and which are to be banned or deprecated. If 
we force an already tenuous and heterogeneous community to choose 
between A.) a WG charter full of carve-outs and constraints that don't 
have meaningful consensus and B.) no WG, we might end up with two 
communities, and I'm not even sure the one happy with the WG will be the 
bigger one (measured by end-users in currently-live production 
deployments).

I think we should optimize for buy-in, legitimacy, and collaboration, 
and be very careful to avoid ratifying a charter that closes more doors 
than it opens (or even one that /appears /to, in the eyes of folks with 
little W3C experience).

Thanks,
__bumblefudge