Should W3C Social Web Interest Community Group (open to all) resolve next week to charter a new Social Web Working Group (open only to employees of member companies) without clarifying why or to what ends?

Context:
It was almost proposed/passed without notice at unrecorded and hard to hear remotely in person meeting the other day at TPAC.
https://mastodon.social/@bengo/111051525999167046
It will be proposed on Sep 22:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2023Sep/0012.html

Boost it

@bengo "It was almost proposed/passed without notice at unrecorded and hard to hear remotely in person meeting the other day at TPAC."

That's not true.

The proposal was to start the chartering process. The CG can't set up a WG; we have to request one from the @w3c .

So, the process would be making a bullet-point list of what the WG would be working on.

@evan @w3c There were more proposals than just yours. I agree that your narrow proposal was simply to explore, but it was after a much more elaborate, compound, and ambiguous one.

@bengo @evan @w3c I read the minutes and can confirm that this wasnt really a close call. but im not sure i understand the benefits of having a separate (and potentially closed-off) working group in addition to the open CG, and I did not feel that the proposers clearly articulated their motivations behind this proposal. My gut is telling me that something's off.

Are there any valid arguments in favor of doing this?

@djsf @bengo @w3c the main one is that only a working group can publish updates to the official documents. The CG can publish errata and clarifications, but it takes a WG to make an official update.

(Mostly. Apparently there's a process where we can correct editorial errors, but not make normative changes.)

@evan @bengo @w3c got it. In that case I'm not against the idea, but would be interested in watching its activities closely. my main concern is ensuring that the WG does not put forward any proposals that could leave the Fediverse vulnerable to an EEE campaign by social media corporations.

@djsf @evan @w3c sure. Me too. We can mitigate that risk by not having a WG and working together in the CG

@bengo @evan @w3c that is a good first line of defense. generally i would think it is not useful create a WG unless it is trying to solve a widely recognized problem in the social web or with a specific document.

"Widely recognized" means that it has been a topic of organic discussion in the wider W3 community and not an artificial one invented solely for the purpose of forming a WG.

Confusion around the purpose of a proposed WG is not a great sign.

@djsf @bengo the widely recognized problem is that we have some assumptions built into the specs that aren't 100% clear.

For example, we don't say that the people in your followers list are unique; they should only appear on that list once.

It would be nice to add that kind of clarification to the documents. Technically, it's a normative change, so we need a WG.

I think you may be overestimating the interest of tech companies in ActivityPub.

@evan @bengo that makes sense and I can see how a WG could be appropriate here.

However I don't think it's possible to overestimate the interest that entrenched corporations have in protecting their bottom line. EEE is still a real threat to the Fediverse and I think we need to speak plainly about this and stay vigilant.

@djsf @evan @bengo Why are corpos even at the table? It should be instances and open source implementations that work on this stuff. Like what Facebook is going to come in and be like "Oh we need such and such thing in the standard" and the folks at gaycommunists.gunclub need to suddenly break everything in order to support it?

@mauve @djsf @bengo nobody is going to have to break anything.