SWICG CG Charter

Hi All,

I think we all own many thanks to Evan for taking on the whole of the Issue
Triage process and getting ActivityPub and ActivityStreams into a state to
go forwards.

I do go with Tamtek's approach to this but would also like to bring up the
following.

Charter remit. Domain, coverage, and scope.

There are many inherent problems in both AP/AS and also in Social Media as
a medium, there are also social-political, political, commercial versus
non-commercial and also between individual protocols, implementations, and
implementers.

I would like us to pave the way for the standards to go far far beyond the
microblogging Twitter level of Social Media and for The Charter to reflect,
allow, and prepare the way for this.

To do this I think we need to bring a server "capabilities" model into
ActivityPub/ActivityStreams where webfinger can get both supported
ActivityStreams extensions, and also a set of supported media types, this
can default to the existing ActivityStreams 2 context, and be an array of
supported contexts and terms.

There is a tension between the usage of just JSON based packets and JSON-LD
based, this reflects levels of complexity for implementers and in
implementations and needs to be resolved by the CG and WG and not swept
under the carpet and for us to shy away from this or hide intentions for
the sake of one camp or another.

Server management on a technical, social, and political level is not part
of the standard(s) and really needs examining properly, the existing
implementations and solutions. How well can this be documented, formalized,
and standardized will be an interesting problem, but I think we need to
bring this whole area into the fold and reflect this in the charter.

This may all be opening a can of worms, and hope this is not ignored, but I
really think we need a wider remit and scope, and this will be necessary in
order for the standards and future standard to keep up with and in fact
lead the field. paving the way for creating and nurturing Social Media,
Networking, and Collaboration Systems, which will emergently become a
continuum.

From looking at the charter most of what I am presenting here would end up
in the Out of Scope section.

The reasoning behind me bringing all this up, is having seen a wider view
and longer term context to both the web and social media's development. We
are still stuck in an infancy of 20 years of FaceBook's user interface, and
18 years of Twitter/X'es user interface and functionality not really
changing to any degree, and in fact with the case of FaceBook's even being
retrograde.

Kind regards,

Aaron

--
Aaron Gray - @AaronNGray@fosstodon.org | @aaronngray@threads.net

Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher and
Designer, Amateur Type Theorist, Amatuer Computer Scientist,
Environmentalist and Climate Science Researcher and Disseminator.