W3C has started monitoring levels of activity in Community Groups (all groups actually) by watching mailing list and github traffic. Since the SocialCG doesn’t use a mailing list, and has work spread out in places other than https://github.com/swicg the monitoring tools basically make the group look abandoned (thanks @Sebastian for noticing this).
I’ve reached out to the W3C systems team, who do want to support the CG’s work mode better (and in the meantime have disabled the misleading activity chart on the CG homepage).
One thing that other CGs I’ve been involved with have is a process for including work items under the remit of the CG. This often involves moving or creating a repo under the CG’s gh organisation, but I’d understand if folks working on adjacent projects didn’t want to move their repos (or even use github).
Anyway, first I want to ask if we were to create a list of projects that we could consider under the remit of the CG, what to include? Any thoughts on criteria? An advantage for projects to be “CG projects” might include wider exposure, and time to discuss issues at CG meetings, but I’m not sure how attractive that is.
And if anyone else has any thoughts about this generally? Perhaps this extremely loose organisation is working for everone, and we shouldn’t try to introduce more process. But if we look like an active CG from the W3C’s perspective, we may get more visibility (and thus more participation) from people approaching via W3C.
I definitely think a candidate work item would be some documentation on ‘how to make an extension’, plus some tools to make it easier to define a new class/property and instantly publish documentation for them.
Personally, I think this kind of documentation and tooling would make it easier to make extensions that don’t require amending the as2 or activitypub specs themselves, i.e. it would make it easier for non-linked-data-experts to use linked data as the extension mechanism instead of a CG-governed single namespace of extensions (IMO it’s a fools errand to try to govern a centralized registry/namespace with volunteers. It’s a recipe for bikeshedding.).
Just one suggestion. Curious what work items others suggest because this likely isn’t the most urgent.
Could you clarify what “under the remit of the CG” means?
Does this mean the CG just acknowledges the many projects and things happening (e.g. ActivityPub Conference or this forum) or does it mean that there should be some process where the Social CG becomes formally involved and exerts control over projects?
+1 for documentation. I think that “vocabulary extensions” are super important and needs to be done. But I believe there are more fundamental things that first need documentation to use/develop ActivityPub (e.g. Authentication, WebFinger, …).
There has been work on the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals as a medium for documentation and “light-weight” community consensus.
Would the FEPs be something that would fit “under the remit of the CG”?
I think this forum is insufficient to track work items. It is great to bring them up, discuss, and refer to them later. We need an issue tracker for the record keeping of TODO’s.
Well actually we have an issue tracker, that of the ActivityPub group on Github. I had started to import the issues and use that, but could not finish for some bug got into the game. So we should have another look at it.
You probably refer to the W3C Issue Tracker, I guess? I think this is more related to the specification itself and the #meeting:socialcg than that it is usable to track community issues that were raised on this forum.
agreed, I don’t want to track work items or issues here. Just started the thread to see where other peoples’ thoughts were with this. So thanks for responses all!
Could you clarify what “under the remit of the CG” means?
I’m not entirely sure. This is something we can define for ourselves. I would like to see the SocialCG as a place that provides support - infrastructure, comms, outreach, collaboration - for those in the community who want it. Note that we also get the value of members signing the W3C IPR agreement by joining the group, so specs worked on by group members can easily progress to standards-track work items in formal Working Groups. We can also produce official (W3C-hosted and stamped) reports which can be used as input documents to new or existing WGs.
I’ll be thinking more about this in the next week or so and maybe drawing up some proposals.