SocialCG

From W3C Wiki

Group Name

Name
Social Web Incubator Community Group
Short Name
SocialCG (historically sometimes also swicg)
Homepage
https://www.w3.org/community/SocialCG
IRC
#social on irc.w3.org (shared with Socialwg)
IRC Logs
https://chat.indieweb.org/social
Mailing List
public-swicg@w3.org
Events (meetings)
https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/socialcg/calendar/
GitHub
https://github.com/swicg/general

WG Discussion

The CG is currently discussing interest in creating a Social Web Working Group. Leave your comments on the Social WG Charter Discussion wiki page. You will need to be a member of the CG to contribute to the wiki page. Join on the W3C website.

Description

The purpose of the Social Web Incubator Community Group is to continue and extend the development of vocabularies, formats and protocols to support the distributed / federated social web, as well as related technologies (such as anti-abuse and anti-spam techniques suitable for an open web). This group continues the work of the W3C Social Web Working Group. As proposals gain support and become more stable and mature, they will be considered for migration to a W3C Working Group where they can be put on the Recommendation track with appropriate status and Intellectual Property (IP) considerations.

Though the group is generally shortened as SocialCG, the "Web" and "Incubator" aspects of the group should not be missed:

  • Web: We're specifically about generating web technologies in the distributed / federated social space. There are other federated / distributed networked systems out there (such as XMPP), many of which are quite excellent, but not the role of this group. (However, bridging federated / distributed web technologies with these systems is an acceptable topic in the group.)
  • Incubator: This is not a working group, so we do not have the authority to designate official W3C standards. However, it's the hope of this group to encourage the development of such technologies, which may be published as drafts from the group with the aim to become official standards. (Note that this group does have the authority to publish extensions to the ActivityStreams vocabulary.) In other words, we want to bring together the real world experiences of implementors in this space, and encourage implementors to work within this group to hash out what the right future directions are.

View frequently asked questions about the SocialCG.

Details

In particular, the work of the Social Web Working Group that this community group is continuing includes but is not limited to:

  • Maintaining the Activity Streams namespaces or other namespaces
  • Coordinating extensions and collecting errata from any specs published by the Social Web Working Group

The group also maintains the test suite and validators for the various specs.

Participation

Membership of the group is open to everybody but all participants must sign the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement.

  • For general discussion, we use the #social IRC channel on irc.w3.org. Logs are available at https://chat.indieweb.org/social
  • For discussion related to a particular technology, we use the issue tracker on the particular specification, or our general issue tracker for the group here https://github.com/swicg/general.
  • We may post general news and events on the group's blog.
  • The group uses the w3c wiki for documenting conclusions and general information.
  • We have a publicly archived email mailing list hosted by W3C. Joining the group automatically subscribes you to this list and enables you to post to it.

If you do not wish to use Github.com to participate in discussions, you are welcome to leave your comments in IRC or by emailing the SocialCG mailing list and reference a Github issue or repository. The channel is logged, and you can participate in the discussion there.

Meetings

Meetings are posted on the W3C Social CG Calendar.

As of 2024-03-01, meetings are on first Fridays.

If you are chairing or hosting a meeting, please read SocialCG#Meeting_Process for how to set the IRC channel up for logging, queuing, etc.

Participation

Membership of the group is open to everybody but all participants must sign the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement by joining the group.

Joining the meeting

Calls take place across IRC for text chat (including taking minutes) and bigbluebutton for voice (works in browser, and there are clients for every mainstream OS). Calls are scribed for the record and so individuals who are unwilling or unable to speak on voice to be able to participate.

  • IRC: #social on irc.w3.org
    • we use this for queuing to speak, and taking minutes
  • bbb: https://bbb.w3c.social/ - please see the meeting announcement for the specific room
    • with fallback to jitsi only if there are problems with bbb
    • Please mute yourself or use push to talk so as to not interrupt when others are speaking!
    • Also be sure to wear headphones when using a microphone. Otherwise there will be an echo and everyone will be sad.
  • Logs: https://chat.indieweb.org/social/

Next meeting

  • 2021-01-29 1700 UTC Agenda TBC

Meeting minutes

Minutes are logged to w3c servers, and the index is below. Note that for logging to work, the IRC bots need to be activated - see SocialCG#Meeting_Process.

Meeting minutes archive

Meeting Process

Starting the Meeting

The chair will summon the bots to start the meeting.

  • If they're not present, /invite RRSAgent and /invite Zakim
  • Zakim, please start meeting
  • RRSAgent, make logs public
  • chair: cwebber indicates to the minuting bot who is the chair on the call
  • scribenick: aaronpk indicates who is scribing. this attributes anything the scribe says in IRC to the person they are quoting.
  • Meeting: Social Web Incubator CG

Attendance

After the RRSAgent bot announces the start of the meeting, announce in IRC that you are on the call:

  • present+

Queuing

Queueing is how we avoid everyone talking over each other. If you want to say something on the call, you can put yourself on the queue and will be acknowledged by the chair.

  • q+ quickly add yourself to the queue
  • q+ to say cwebber is a great chair queue yourself and add a note that will be repeated when you are acknowledged. (The "to" is important here.)
  • q+ nickname add someone else to the queue
  • q- remove yourself from the queue
  • q- later to move yourself later in the queue
  • ack nickname the chair will ack people, which removes them from the queue, and then you can start talking

Off The Record Comments

If you do not want your comments in IRC to show up in the minutes use /me. Any such lines will be left out of the minutes, but remember, the channel is still publicly logged.

Scribing

The bot will only look at whoever is set as scribe for the transcription of what is being said.

You need to set the scribe. You can always change the scribenick part way through the meeting if someone else needs to take over

  • scribenick: my_irc_handle this sets the IRC username for the bot to listen to
  • Scribe: John Doe This sets the display name for the scribe, You don't need this if you just want it to be your IRC handle

Noting the topics makes the minutes formatted nicer with header sections. To indicate the new topic, use

  • TOPIC: Topic Name Here

Display who is talking with their username followed by a colon, this tends to be the default autocomplete in many IRC clients.

  • jdoe: I agree with that stalement

You don't need to type the username every time. You can scribe subsequent lines by starting with ..., eg:

  • ... and furthermore, I think the chairs are great.
  • ... Don't forget to buy them snacks when you next see them.

Anyone can correct the scribe by using a regex. This gets picked up by the bot that processes the minutes and automatically fixes them, but only the one instance of the mistake that occurs immediately before the regex message.

  • s/stalement/statement/

End meeting

  • Zakim, end meeting
  • (and Zakim should trigger RRSAgent to make the minutes with RRSAgent, please draft minutes