Forasphere: Alignment on forum softwares?

Fediversity Fediverse Futures
23

@devnull posted meeting notes which spendidly popped up in my Mastodon UI ( :rocket: ). There was one part of the notes where I felt I needed to follow-up on, namely:

  • FEP has a more asynchronous process for clearing out objections, less cohesion than SocialCG
    • Discussions take place on SocialHub

That last bit isn’t entirely accurate. Quoting my toots:

Important note to discussions of the #FEP.

SocialHub merely facilitates the FEP process.

The #SocialHub #ActivityPub dev community is only the default community channel.

Meaning its optional. By no means is it required to discuss there, if you don’t want to. For any FEP a forum topic is created, but you can discuss anywhere else.

Each FEP document in the #codeberg repo gets an accompanying tracking issue that list all the places where discussion takes place.

Diagram sketch of a 3-stage bottom-up standards process, with at the bottom a decentralized ecosystem of devhubs and projects (SocialHub community being one of them). One layer above is the informal FEP process where people can showcase their extensions to the specs in hopes of further adoption. There can be more organization at this level, like FediForum working groups. At the top level sits currently the formal W3C process, where SocialCG coordinates, and a WG may be chartered.
Diagram sketch of a 3-stage bottom-up standards process, with at the bottom a decentralized ecosystem of devhubs and projects (SocialHub community being one of them). One layer above is the informal FEP process where people can showcase their extensions to the specs in hopes of further adoption. There can be more organization at this level, like FediForum working groups. At the top level sits currently the formal W3C process, where SocialCG coordinates, and a WG may be chartered.1651×1070 112 KB

So if you have a working group at #FediForum or #SocialCG the discussions can take place entirely at these locations to keep everything together. And still posts #FEP’s to gather feedback on them and see folks implement them.

As suggested in the diagram there’s interaction from the #W3C #SocialCG who cherry-pick as needed whenever they see opportunity to further standardize particular artifacts that’re crafted anywhere in the decentralized #ActivityPub developer community.

So cc @eprodrom and @j12t in another plea for a bottom-up standards process that fits a decentralized open ecosystem:

  • FediForum and SocialCG and any other devhub have direct access to the FEP process.
  • SocialHub is merely facilitating the process itself, only optionally part of the authoring workflow.
  • Important goal, no gatekeeping: FEP Process is wholly open and is available for everyone.

If you feel that the FEP process needs to be changed, in order to meet that goal… that’s great. Continual improvement is part of the process itself and any feedback most welcome. :smiley:

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