Re: Proposal for good developer relationships on the social web

Hi all,

I just want to clarify: the short discussion I had with Evan was about the open letter from a few weeks ago. Looking at the PR comments, and understanding that any significant changes to the letter would require re-affirming all existing signatures, I suggested that perhaps it was better for SWICG to put out a statement on collaboration and mutual respect, which is within the spirit of the letter.

It does need to be a bit more than just "we have a code of conduct", because that usually only applies within the official groups, not to behavior on social media, in chat rooms, or at events. It also doesn't cover deliberately baiting another person with a misleading or inflammatory comment, which is the primary behavior the letter was about.

As long as people with significant influence within SWICG and the broader ecosystem continue to try to fight for superiority over other protocols or software built on those protocols, we continue to do ourselves a disservice.

We can engage with one another respectfully and without ego or ulterior motives. We can work together where it makes sense, when there is an overlap in knowledge or specifications.

Hopefully this clarifies the matter at hand.

Yours,
Emelia Smith

> On 9 Oct 2025, at 18:10, Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:
> 
> Last week, I spent some time talking with Emelia Smith about cooperation with other developer communities on the social web, outside of the ActivityPub and Indie Web ecosystems. We thought that making a proposal that the CG could pass as a resolution would be a good step forward.
> 
> I volunteered to write a compact, proposal-ready statement. Here's the first draft:
> 
> PROPOSED: Our Community Group includes members that focus on the ActivityPub, Indie Web, ATProto, Nostr and DSNP ecosystems. We re-commit ourselves to working together in this group under the W3C Code of Conduct https://www.w3.org/policies/code-of-conduct/ and the General Communications Policies for W3C Community Groups https://www.w3.org/community/about/process/#general-policies . We further commit to hold ourselves to the same standard of conduct with social web developers, regardless of the protocol they work with, outside of the Community group context, in public or private, such as in online discussions or in-person meetings.
> 
> I think this grounds our expected behaviour in already well-established policies. It reemphasizes the level of behaviour we all committed to when we joined the group. And it extends our expected level of behaviour outside of the CG context (mailing list, meetings, GitHub, forums) to other contexts as well.
> 
> I can put this up on my private GitHub repo or add it to the SWICG repos, or just add it to the agenda for the November meeting (TPAC).
> 
> Evan
>