Processing the FEP backlog

Standards Fediverse Enhancement Proposals
1

Hi folks,

The FEP repo currently has three proposals that are in DRAFT status and are overdue to be finalized or withdrawn. I’m proposing to waive the 60/120 day deadlines and contact each of the authors directly (at the contact email in the proposal) and proceed per the process:

  1. After at least 60 days the authors may request the proposal to be finalized. This is done by requesting final comments on the proposal.
    • If there are no community objections within 14 days and the authors can show that they have initiated sufficient awareness and discussion of the proposal, an editor will set the status of the submission to FINAL .
  2. If after 120 days the authors have not requested the proposal to be finalized or there is no community consensus, an editor will set the status of the submission to WITHDRAWN .

In 5) it’s not clear where the request should go but if I send an email, then I’d consider a positive reply as the necessary request. 120 days have passed as well so we’re ok to set them to WITHDRAWN if there’s no response within 14 days.

Here’s a possible message:

Hello,

With the addition of two new editors, the Fediverse Enhancement Process is back in operation.

Your submission (FEP-xxxx) is due for action and I’m writing to you today to ask if you’d like that proposal to be finalized. If so, please post a link in the tracking issue to a discussion where final comments are/were requested and the following standard will be applied before finalization:

  • If there are no community objections within 14 days and the authors can show that they have initiated sufficient awareness and discussion of the proposal, an editor will set the status of the submission to FINAL .

Sincerely, etc…

Any objections? I’m looking to move forward within the next few days.

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This whole process with formality and deadlines etc. only works if there’s buy-in and active involvement by the community.

Without it anyone can create FINAL fep’s if they are the only one interested in a certain capability. I don’t know if that is necessarily bad, but also I have the feeling that it may not be in any way meaningful and very useful. What is “sufficient awareness”?

I feel that the deeper problem with SocialHub is that currently there’s not really a Community, so neither are there “community objections” other than a ‘casual’ chat on a fep topic.

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I agree the formality may be a bit much but at least it’s a documented process.

That"sufficient awareness" line is quoted from the FEP FEP. Anyone can create a spec and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means unknown buy-in and some obvious errors can exist.

What a successful standards process develops eventually is a brand that raises the profile of the documents they produce. Some require something more concrete, like an implementation, or fractional adoption by the user community, but here the bar is I believe purposely low. If you browse IETF RFCs you’ll note there are thousands that never really saw adoption, but adoption is another problem to solve.

Standards process I see simply as curated publishing. It’s up to a community (however that emerges), users, businesses etc to converge on a document and bring it to life.

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Since we got the new submission for Web Monetization, I took this opportunity to revisit this. Just sent emails to the three existing FEP draft authors.

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