The Social Web Incubator Community Group (also known as SocialCG, or SWICG) is the successor of the Social Web Working Group, which ran from 2014 to 2017. The SocialCG provides space to collaborate and coordinate for implementors who are building on any of the specifications published by the Social Web WG, and related technologies. It is also a place to incubate new proposals which build on or complement the Social Web WG recommendations.
Discussions and meeting announcements happen on the SocialHub forum or on project-specific version control repositories.
Meetings are not always weekly, but can be requested or convened by any member of the group. If you have a specific item to discuss, please contact a chair if you need help with meeting logistics, and make a post on the SocialHub forum, ideally with two or more weeks notice.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
The next SWICG special topic call will be held Friday November 17, 2023, where the editors would like to gather community input on the various AP/AS2 issues marked with the Needs Group Input/Decision tag.
The call will be held at 9am ET / 6am PT / 3pm CET, at:
Introductions (optional) and community announcements.
IP Protection Note Reminder: (a) Anyone can participate in these calls. However, all substantive contributors to any CG Work Items must be members of the CG with full IPR agreements signed, and (b); To contribute to Work Items: ensure you have a W3 account, and sign the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
Discussion on a formal decision making process for the group, following on from community discussion.
A discussion on scope for a prospective WG, following on from our previous CG meeting, discussions on the mailing list, and contributions to the wiki (see below for more information).
The wiki page is open to all CG members. You can log in with the same username and password you use for your W3C account. Please let the Chairs know via a private email if login doesn’t work so we can assist you directly.
WGs have the ability to create technical documents for consideration on the W3C Standards Track and to amend existing W3C Recommendations. The Chairs have created a “Deliverables” section in which we invite you to list any deliverables that you think are appropriate to include in a WG.
If you have further notes or comments about the WG Charter discussion, please leave them on the page so that we can aggregate as much information as possible in one place.
The Chairs have prepared an FAQ with answers to common questions with regard to the Social CG and the working group system at the W3C. This FAQ answers questions such as:
Can the Social CG amend existing social web standards from the former WG?
Can the Social CG produce standards?
How does the W3C, the Social CG, and Social WG relate to ActivityPub?
If you have feedback about the FAQs, please join #social on irc.w3.org and share your feedback.
IRC Chat
During Social CG meetings, we take notes in IRC. We also use IRC to record when participants have questions to ask during the call. Meeting notes are archived on the W3C website for later reference. A link to the meeting notes will be available shortly after the meeting concludes.
You can join the meeting chat by connecting to irc.w3.org on IRC and joining the #social channel. You can also join directly from the irc.w3.org website. If you join using the website, you will need to choose a nickname. In the Channels form, set the value #social.
The Social Web Community Group met on September 12th in a hybrid W3C TPAC session, and in subsequent sessions on September 13th concerning ActivityPub test suite development and data portability.
We have scheduled a meeting for Friday, September 22nd to follow on from discussions during the meetings held at TPAC.
The meeting will be at 9am ET / 2pm UK / 6am PT, and hosted at https://meet.jit.si/social-web-cg.
The rough agenda for the meeting is as follows:
- Introductions (optional) and community announcements
- IP Protection Note Reminder: (a) Anyone can participate in these calls. However, all substantive contributors to any CG Work Items must be members of the CG with full IPR agreements signed, and (b); To contribute to Work Items: ensure you have a W3 account, and sign the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
- A discussion on rechartering a W3C Social Web Working Group (WG), and whether there is broad community interest in doing so.
- Discussion to start a data portability task force that would focus on social web data portability (particularly with regard to ActivityPub), and the scope thereof (if time allows, otherwise this will be pushed to the next meeting).
- Any other business.
All interested Community Group members are encouraged to attend the meeting. During the call, minutes will be taken by the appointed scribe and distributed after the meeting, as usual.
If you have any other business to propose, please contact the Chairs.
If you would like to review the meeting notes from TPAC, you can do so from the following links:
- SWICG group meeting: https://www.w3.org/2023/09/12-social-minutes.html
- Data portability meeting: https://www.w3.org/2023/09/13-social-minutes.html
- Test suite meeting: https://www.w3.org/2023/09/13-socialweb-test-suite-minutes.html
Thank you,
The Chairs
This note was originally posted on the mailing list but not propagated up here. The Chairs apologize for the delay in posting here.Edits have been made per feedback from the community.
SocialWeb CG is planning a hybrid (in-person plus remote) group meeting during TPAC 2023 (the major W3C yearly technical conference) in Seville, Spain.
The meeting will be on Tuesday, Sept 12 at 9:30am-11:00am CEST (local Seville time) / 3:30am-5:00am EDT / 12:30am-2:00am PDT.
There has been a significant amount of conversation, activity, and demand, regarding an interoperability test suite for ActivityPub (and related specs), to help new implementations and interop with existing ones. This includes several new in-progress test suites, as well as a fediverse Group for test related posts over at https://venera.social/profile/activitypubtestsuite
The SocialWeb Community Group is hosting a Special Topic call on AP Interop Test Suite implementations, to introduce existing suites, and to discuss challenges, pain points and next steps, on Friday, August 11, at 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific / 6pm CET, at:
In light of the recent report Addressing Child Exploitation on Federated Social Media and the many important resulting conversations (such as this megathread), SWICG would like to host a Special Topic Call on “Social Web and CSAM: Liabilities and Tooling”, this coming Friday, August 4th, 2023, at 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific / 6pm CET, at:
One of the existing co-chairs, Aaron Parecki, gives his regards to the group and wanted to convey that he hasn’t had as much bandwidth to dedicate to SWICG. He has asked to step down as co-chair, and nominate James Gallagher in his stead.
Welcome, James! We’re looking forward to working on the Social Web with you!
The next SWICG monthly call is this coming Friday, Jul 21, am EST / 6am PST / 6pm CET, at: https://meet.jit.si/social-web-cg
Rough Agenda: 1) Introductions (optional) and community announcements 2) IP Protection Note Reminder: a. Anyone can participate in these calls. However, all substantive contributors to any CG Work Items must be members of the CG with full IPR agreements signed. https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/join b. To contribute to Work Items: ensure you have a W3 account: https://www.w3.org/accounts/request, and sign the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA): https://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/cla/ 3) Upcoming W3C TPAC meeting (11-15 September, hybrid format – online and in-person in Seville, Spain) 4) Adopting CG work items discussion 5) github issue processing (items requiring community discussion). Thanks!
Finding a regular meeting time slot that works with everyone continues to be a challenging task.
In the interest of getting momentum going, we’ll be having our first SWICG call of the year this coming Friday, May 19, at 9 am EST / 6 am Pacific / 3 pm CET over at:
Apologies in advance to those who can’t make it, let’s continue the discussion on what we can do to accommodate more people (perhaps alternate biweekly calls, one on Fri and one on Saturday, etc).
AGENDA:
1) (NON-AGENDA item) Although the common first call agenda tradition is introductions, I’m wondering if we can shortcut the introduction process by doing it elsewhere, such as on the SWICG mailing list, or SocialHub forum. Otherwise there’s a good chance that we’ll take up the whole call with introductions.
2) Overview of the W3C Community Group process (code of conduct, governance, etc) to refresh our memories.
3) Discussion and proposals for:
* What are the goals and current focus of SWICG
* What is SWICG’s relationship with the other centers of community and discussion, such as SocialHub https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/, Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep, the Fedidevs Matrix chat rooms. (My view on this: We can all work together with those communities, without co-opting or interference.)
* Governance process for adopting Work Items. (For a good example of an existing effective Work Item Process, see the Credential Community Group’s process doc: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/workitem-process/ )
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