Restructuring sounds like a recipe for disaster. Couldn’t they just pay the people working on it now? Maybe that’s a dumb idea, but it seems like paying the people who are passionate about it and not gatekeeped out of the discussion is a good thing.

The SWICG had a meeting about restructuring

The Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG) had a meeting this week, and one of the items that was being discussed is the potential restructuring of the group. This is a fairly relevant and important discussion, but the meaning of this might need some context: the W3C is the main organisation that is responsible for internet standards, such as ActivityPub, but many others as well. They can start Working Groups, who can produce official recommendations for internet standards. Between 2014 and 2018, the Social Web Working Group worked on the standards that power the fediverse, and in 2018 the W3C officially published the ActivityPub standard as a recommendation. The Working Group, having completed their recommendation, spun down, and started the Social Web Incubator Community Group, which maintains and coordinates work on the Social Web standards.

The main relevant difference between a Working Group and a Community Group, is that a members of a Working Group need to be either part of a organisation that is a (paid) member of the W3C, or be invited in as an Independent Expert. A Community Group is open to everyone. A Working Group can publish updates to the official documents, while a Community Group can only publish errata and clarifications.

The basic tradeoff can be summarised as follows: people feel that the standards as they are currently published need updates and work. This is hard to do with the mandate of a CG. Rechartering a WG enables more updates to the standards and protocols. This comes at the cost of openness however, as anyone can join a CG, and the ability to join a WG is significantly limited. As typically the criteria for being a member of a WG is to either be an employee of a W3C member organisation, or to be invited in as an Independent Expert, this might give participating organisations and companies more influence than independent fediverse developers.

The discussion on this will continue on Friday 22th (1300 UTC) with the next meeting of the SWICG.