Re: Working Group: maintenance vs active work

I'd love to see new features too - I think some new features are quite
critical to the Fediverse working well. My personal list of most important
new features, influenced by what people seem willing to work on as well as
by importance:

   -

   Threaded conversations - addresses a functional lack in ActivityPub in
   how it shares forum-style conversations, despite frequently being used to
   do so.
   -

   Signed messages - addresses several issues in safety and identity
   management, especially given the very decentralized nature of the Fediverse
   -

   Account portability - also addresses issues in identity management, as
   well as allowing moderation to be more effective
   -

   Moderation load-sharing - addresses issues of safety in the Fediverse by
   making moderators more effective and more able to scale their work


That said, all of these are a lot of work, and maintenance is even more
time critical. My gut feeling is that all of this is too much and
maintenance just on the ActivityPub/Stream core specs might be too little.
But, it's often a good idea to start small and then add to scope as
capacity and capability are demonstrated. Charters can be added to.

Also, the bigger picture with the incubation process seems to be that the
CG would have larger and expandable scope, with the ability to suggest new
work items to some WG as they matured.

Lisa

On Fri, Nov 1, 2024 at 5:29 PM Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Reviewing the potential charters for a WG in
> https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/, I notice that
> both ap-maintenance-wg-charter.html
> and social-web-maintenance-wg-charter.html focus exclusively on
> maintenance, and exclude new functionality.
>
> That sounds a bit like we’ve declared the End of History in standard-based
> social web interoperability. All the world needs is maybe five computers,
> perhaps?
>
> New requirements will pop up and innovations will occur in the market.
> Where do we want people to go if they would like to turn over their
> invention to an open standard body?
>
> Seems to me that if SocialWG is not open for new work, they will go
> elsewhere. I would consider this a suboptimal outcome.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
>
> Johannes.
>
>
> Johannes Ernst
>
> Fediforum <https://fediforum.org/>
> Dazzle Labs <https://dazzlelabs.net/>
>
>
>
>