Re: WG Scope

Hey chat, what's the timeline on these charter proposals?  I remember
hearing something about "the end of March" which is... Monday?

I would like to ask one last time for anyone reading this to take a glance
at the open PRs <https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/pulls> and
issues over the weekend, and comment on any PR they don't understand or
have feelings about, with hopefully lower stakes than an on-call +1/-1.
Next week (I presume?) the chairs [+PLH?] have a meeting about next steps
before our next whole-CG meeting.  It feels like a very small subset of the
people who have spoken at meetings about scope have been +1ing and
commenting in the potential-charters repo, and none of the "notes-readers"
from the broader community; I suspect that people might be putting off this
odious, tax-filing-like chore for lack of clear timelines and deadlines
(one of my shrinks called this "plausible avoidance" and I never recovered
from the insult). Would a definitive deadline for new PRs help? Could it
be... sunday midnight server-time? In other working group contexts, I've
seen an explicit social contract that "any issues not closed by a PR get
resolved unilaterally by chairs" after the PR deadline, which I fear might
happen here for lack of more time for deliberation...

Anxiously consensual,
__juan

On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 4:06 PM Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:

> Thanks! It'd be especially helpful to get feedback from Christine and
> Tantek on this.
>
> I hope that it balances Tantek's expectation that the Indyweb stack
> recommendations would be in-scope for the WG, with Christine's concern for
> not overloading the WG with too much work at any one time.
>
> One question for Philippe: is it acceptable to leave the scope open like
> this? That is, the WG will maintain all of the recommendations that came
> out of the (first) Social Web Working Group, but without a specific
> delivery date for the next version of each one?
>
> Evan
> On 2025-03-24 6:57 a.m., Bumblefudge wrote:
>
> Hey Evan:
>
> Thanks for pushing on this, I heartily agree that however the WG(s) get
> scoped, it is crucial to stagger and manage parallel work openly and
> publicly. I opened a PR that I hope speeds up discussion on this kind of
> workflow mechanism, and will extend it to the other proposals once I've
> gotten some feedback, approvals, and/or competing PRs! The clock is
> ticking, though, so timely review would be appreciated from the CG.
>
> Hastily,
> __juan
>
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2025 at 8:19 PM Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name>
> wrote:
>
>> I added an issue to the potential-charters repository with a proposal for
>> managing scope for the WG:
>>
>> https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/issues/83
>>
>> I think we should consider *all* the Social Web Working Group
>> recommendations as in-scope for the new WG, but let the new WG set its own
>> schedule and prioritisation for maintaining those documents.
>>
>> I think this would balance the need to maintain all the existing
>> documents on the one hand against the limited time and attention of the
>> working group on the other.
>>
>> As an example of how this could work (and *not a proposal for an actual
>> work schedule, please do not at me*), imagine that, almost immediately,
>> the workgroup starts with these document revisions:
>>
>>
>>
>>    - Activity Streams 2.1 (core and vocabulary) - incorporate errata,
>>    improve clarity
>>    - ActivityPub 1.1 - incorporate errata, expand media upload, define
>>    replies maintenance, etc.
>>
>>
>> As this work winds down, and these documents move into the final stages
>> of recommendation, the WG might take on more work:
>>
>>
>>    - WebSub 1.1 - errata and clarifications
>>    - LOLA 1.0 - define LOLA
>>
>>
>> (Again, this is just an example schedule. I don't know if WebSub needs a
>> 1.1 update or if that's the highest priority change.) As these were
>> completed and moved into PR and TR stage, the group might then take on
>> additional streams of work:
>>
>>
>>    - Activity Streams 2.2 (vocabulary) - expand vocabulary with new terms
>>    - ActivityPub E2EE Messaging - example of new functionality and new
>>    document
>>    - Micropub 1.1 - errata
>>
>> In this example, the WG is keeping a healthy and productive 2-3 parallel
>> document pace, but is still covering multiple documents over the period.
>>
>> The WG could set its own heuristics for initiating new work, such as
>> having N editors for each active document; having N chairs per active
>> document workstream; staging work initiated in the SocialCG; community and
>> implementer demand; and so on.
>>
>> I think that as a more mature WG doing iterative updates to existing
>> work, with occasional extensions to that work, it would not be under the
>> same time pressure as the previous Social Web WG was. If we want, we can
>> set more healthy and realistic expectations for deliverables, and still
>> take responsibility for all the docs published by the previous Social Web
>> WG.
>>
>> Evan
>>
>