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.
swicgGroup'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 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/ )
We’re planning the first call for the SWICG. This will be on Friday, May 5th of 2017 at 4PM GMT. This will be a loose call, mostly talking about what’s currently happening in the federated social web and discussing what topics we’d like to take on as a group.
The call will be over the Mumble Voice over IP system, but will be transcribed to IRC. (Users unable or unwilling to speak over voice will be represented on the call by dictating their communication over the call.)
Connect on IRC to #social on irc.w3.org
Set up Mumble and connect to: dustycloud.org / port 64738 / password “goblincamp”. Join the Social Web Incubator Community Group channel.
Mumble is easy to use (and there are a couple of mobile clients available) but if this is your first time using it, please connect 15 minutes early to make sure your audio system is working correctly. You’ll need a microphone and to *wear headphones*… otherwise audio will echo and that’s no fun for anyone.
We’re still figuring some things out, but loosely, we’re following the Django Code of Conduct. If you’re unfamiliar, have a read of it!
That’s it… look forward to seeing you at the call!
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.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2016-11-18 by Aaron Parecki. The following people supported its creation: Aaron Parecki, Tantek Çelik, Benjamin Roberts, Amy Guy, Sandro Hawke, Evan Prodromou. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.
If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at [email protected]
swicg
