Train from Kirkcaldy to Newcastle in March
21.50gbp (expensed) (€25.47 / $26.25 / £21.5)
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w3c (16 out of 122)
- It's getting colder.
- Supposedly back down to 3 days a week now, but I'm still feeling entirely overwhelmed by co-op stuff. All of the W3C drama in the background is passing me by. I just can't.
- I'm thankful for the sea.
- Had a new novel idea. Maybe for nanowrimo.
- Finished Whisperer in Darkness (finally). Started Feersum Enjinns.
- Watched a lot of Ted Lasso. Plodding through Foundation (it's alright but doesn't make me want to watch lots. That's probably a good thing.) Started Ashoka. Watched The Little Mermaid (the newest one).
- Swam in the sea twice.
- Tried my hand at chocolate mole.
- Made apple cake and did a puffball mushroom demo at the Community Kitchen.
- Successful fruit leather experiment.
- Went apple picking and spent several hours processing them into juice.
- Rainy forage for parasols.
- A tightly scoped charter, focussed on "maintenance" of (errata and clarifications) the ActivityPub and ActivityStreams 2.0 specifications alone.
- A set of criteria for selection of two or three co-chairs of the group (see eg. this self-review draft from csarven). The W3C Team ultimately nominates chairs, but we can make recommendations to them, and I'd advocate for their decision making process and rationale to be completely transparent.
- A set of criteria which Invited Experts should meet. We should enable people who have stewarded communities and moderated instances in the fediverse or similar to participate, as well as current implementers, and implementers who plan to integrate AP into exisiting software in future. We should make the criteria as open and inclusive as possible so we have a meaningfully diverse set of voices in the group; and it will also help us to transparently justify every group participant, and help others understand the perspective each person brings.
- A clear process for individuals to self-nominate as IEs. Ultmiately the chair(s) decide who can join as an IE, and it's always a worry that they approve people they know and reject people they don't. If we have a clear set of criteria, then people who are not known to someone on the "inside" can apply on solid ground and feel secure that their application is considered on its own merits.
- A clear participation process. We should know when a meeting is "quorate", how we make decisions (in more detail than "consensus"), and enable async participation in decision-making as much as possible.
- A clear, documented line of communication/coordination between the WG and the CG. There will certainly be membership overlap, but someone(s) explicitly responsible for feeding information in each direction will be important.
- Went to W3C TPAC onseveral trains.
- Didn't do much touristing in Sevilla.
- Fit Co-op work in the gaps.
- Headed to Tarifa, then on to Tangier.
- Spent a rainy day of touristing in Tangier.
- London for TAG meeting, and dinner with timbl. Productive week, and marginally less awful time in London than usual.
- Enjoyed Kirkcaldy Friday market, featuring Kama Vegan Bakes (who I told about the KDY market when I saw them at the Scottish Vegan Festival) and lunch at the newly opened Kangus!
- Went on a long mushroom walk not far from home but didn't come back with much.
- Got chanterelles, but failed to put them on pizza.
- Good harvests.
- Went on a rock trunting hip to a new agate spot.
After serving two terms, I'm not standing in the upcoming W3C TAG election. I have loved working with the TAG, and been privileged to learn so much from the other members and wider community over the last four years. I wouldn't rule out running for election again in future. But for a while at least, I need to dial back the time I spend behind my keyboard, and put more focus into my (geographically) local community.
If you have a vote in the election, I would strongly encourage you to rank highly Lola Odelola and Sarven Capadisli. Lola has a strong technical background, ample experience of W3C processes, and a track record of fighting for marginalised voices in tech; we've had brilliant, hope-filled conversations at TPACs about what the future could be, and how to build the ethical tech and systems to get there. I worked with Sarven for several years in the Social Web WG days and never have I met someone with such a strong sense of justice and so relentless in pursuit of what they believe in. They'll do the work needed for the TAG to have impact, and far better than I ever could. If these two are elected, I'll sleep easy.
It probably goes without saying that you should also re-elect Hadley Beeman, who has been an invaluable member of the TAG for many many years, a great mentor, and a reliable voice of wisdom.
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🗁Added 13 photos to album Misc visits.
Went to London for an extremely fancy TAG dinner. And a visit to MW and the chickens.
🗁Added 58 photos to album London, Jan 2024.
Three days in The City for TAG f2f. Views of shiny buildings from the Apple office. Lots of coffee and fancy food. Pizza at Purezza with MW before the Caledonian Sleeper home. There were bagpipes, because it was Burns Night.
Week in review: 2nd - 8th October
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TPAC 2023
I was on the fence about attending TPAC right from when the idea first entered my head, to the journey there. I'm glad I went though. It was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and colleagues from the web standards world, and to meet some wonderful new people as well.
The covid precautions taken by the organisers reassured me a lot. It was a four to five hundred person conference, with attendees from all over the world. In spite of relaxed standards taken across most of the rest of the world at this point, we stayed masked, ate outside, and they handed out as many tests as people needed to encourage testing every day. I know a few people who tested positive early on, and attended remotely from their hotel rooms; I hope everyone was so considerate. Last I heard there were a handful of cases reported, and a week later I've avoided it. While wearing masks during a heatwave in Spain for five days running was uncomfortable, I'm glad these were the requirements and I think it was worthwhile. I probably wouldn't have attended without this.
The food was rubbish though; apparently consistently for everyone, not only the vegans :)
The first two days were the most exhausting, and I used up pretty much all of my energy upfront.
I attended the Social CG meeting. I went to the AC meeting, and sat on stage for a TAG panel. I was anxious about this the whole time, as I had carefully arranged my life to avoid public speaking since I left academia, and don't do well thinking on the spot in front of a crowd. Fortunately none of the questions were about anything I had a strong opinion on, so nobody was expecting to hear from me in particular.
I didn't attend many breakouts as I had a few co-op meetings to fit in. I did join the Privacy Task Force breakout, which was a completely packed room, and a surprisingly (sorry, perhaps I'm too cynical) positive discussion. Seems like we're on a good track with the Privacy Principles (though much editorial work remains that I'm on the hook for but not on top of).
At various points I sat in on the RDF Canonicalization and Verifiable Credentials WG meetings. I'm a bit out of the loop, and these meetings were not quite enough to get back into it, but tensions seem high as various pieces of work near completion. I felt like everyone in that room is well overdue a holiday.
In between all of this I spent time in the "hallway track", having excellent conversations.
I was so happy I got to spend time with half of the TAG (Dan, Hadley, Tess, Sangwhan, Lea); as well as Evan, Tantek, Arnaud, Brent, Joe, Juan, Michiel, Amy, Sam, ... ; and Dmitri and Manu however briefly. I also made some amazing new connections, including Lola, Elena, and a bunch of people from Igalia who I was keen to talk about co-ops with. There were plenty of people there I wish I could have managed to see more of, too.
It was an intense week, and I haven't really looked at my email since, but I suspect I have a lot of things to follow up on. I took the scenic route back, via Morocco and Gibraltar, in an attempt to decompress before my whole-co-op meeting next week...
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Social Web Incubator Community Group - face-to-face meeting at TPAC 2023
The Social Web CG meeting featured old faces and new. I hadn't looked at the agenda beforehand, and Evan seemed keen to focus on practical things and make it a working meeting. I think it's tricky to balance this at TPAC, where many curious observers without necessarily deep background sit in, and it's harder for the usual community members to attend (remote is an option, and technically anyone could just dial in, but it's theoretically gated behind a registration, which again, has an option to ask for the fee to be waived, but does imply that most people should have a paid ticket). It turned out that the audio in the room was not great too, so remote participants had trouble taking part. I minuted it here.
Some of the interactions gave me a tight-chested panicky feeling, a throwback to five or more years ago when I was deeply involved in this space, emotionally invested, and having a hard time dealing with all of the conflict. Time constraints aside, I'm hesitant to get more than peripherally involved again for this reason, though I do want to see the work progress. Thoughts about rechartering the Social WG have been floating around for a while, and we had the first minuted conversation about it. There is a lot of enthusiasm for it from the W3C side - it would be a shame to lose the momentum currently in the fediverse, when we could use it to fix up at least the ActivityPub standard. Meanwhile there's a diversity of projects and spinoffs in a community that's so large I can't keep up, and people there are naturally worried about being excluded. I think this is a combination of people who weren't around for the first time, and see it as an exclusive group that only reps of large companies can be involved with, along with people who were there for the first time round and had some bad experiences with the difficult group dynamics, and are not keen to see that repeated.
Personally, I'm not opposed to a WG rechartering, but I'm not strongly advocating for it either. I carry the concern of the latter group, and take seriously the worries about exclusion. W3C process can be completely opaque to most people, and even when they are inclusive on paper (eg. Invited Experts don't need to be part of a W3C member company) this opaqueness as well as tribal knowledge and strongly held assumptions by "insiders" can similarly cause exclusion.
To mitigate this, I think it's safe to charter a continuation of the Social Web WG when we have:
It typically takes ages to get a WG chartered, although I think there's a sense in W3C that this could happen (relatively) quickly for the Social Web, as it's a continuation of an existing group. The biggest impediment are the hangups in the community, old and new, and the emotional reactions people have when they're in disagreement. I get it - I've been there, and still have the scars - but ultimately a majority of potential participants are striving for the same goal, and I really hope there's enough unity in that. Many of us have been burnt, or burned out, but it's a different world now than it was in 2016-2018. We can do things differently.
The disagreements are broadly between people who are doing work as well, who all have opinions and experiences that should be weighted heavily. I understanding wanting to just get stuff done but the price of this shouldn't be ignoring people with a different perspective. I understand having serious concerns, but these can and should be a constructive way of improving the situation for everyone, not stop-energy or a weapon. I hope we can slow down just enough to hear each other, but not so much that we spin our wheels forever. It's a tricky line to walk.
I don't know how involved I'll be. I've already borne witness to public and private blowups about this in the week since the meeting and I don't have a place for that energy in my life. On the other hand, if we can get some more cooperative and inclusive dynamics in place, I'd be more inclined to spend some time.
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Week in review: 11th - 17th September
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🗁Added 55 photos to album Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar.
Five days in Sevilla for TPAC. Reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, and making new ones. I didn't do much touristing, but did manage to find decent vegan tapas. An exhausting but worthwhile week.
I budgeted wrong and used all of my social energy up on Monday, day 1 of this 5 day conference.
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Paris to Toulouse 🚅
Leaving Paris, France at 10:12pm (+02:00) on Saturday the 9th of September 2023 and arriving in Toulouse, France at 7:07am (+02:00) on Sunday the 10th of September 2023
Onwards to TPAC
London to Paris 🚅
Leaving London, UK at 12:31pm (+02:00) on Saturday the 9th of September 2023 and arriving in Paris, France at 3:48pm (+02:00) on Saturday the 9th of September 2023
Onwards to TPAC
Feeling fancy that my agenda for today involves lunch in London and dinner in Paris.
The rest of my agenda involves spending the entire weekend on trains, to get from Fife to Sevilla for W3C TPAC. Pretty sure I'm not going to be able to fit in any meals tomorrow at all.)
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TAG nomination statement
My two year term on the W3C TAG has flown by, and it's election time again. If you're a W3C AC representative, you can vote here (link restricted to AC reps) or read all of the candidate nomination statements here. Please consider ranking me favourably!
I grew up alongside the Web, and have never known the world without it. Early tinkering with HTML and CSS shaped the course of my life and became a formative part of how I interacted with the world. It is deeply important to me to see the Web move forward as a positive force, and to push back against the surveillance, manipulation, and abuse that are routine across many parts of the Web today.
The TAG has a great record over recent years of promoting security, privacy, and accessibility as core parts of Web architecture. I have spent my efforts during my two years as a member of the TAG pushing to go above and beyond these foundations; as a member of the TAG's Privacy Task Force, as well as editor of the draft Societal Impacts Questionnaire. I intend to continue enabling and encouraging specification authors and implementers to consider the broader consequences of their work in the context of a global web which is part of an enormous and ever-changing landscape of cultural norms, legislation, and innovation.
I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, with a visiting year at MIT. My thesis builds on my personal experiences with online communities; I researched self-expression on the Web and how interconnected social and technical systems support or impede online interactions. At the same time, I helped shape the future of the social Web through co-editing and implementing several specifications of the W3C Social Web Working Group, including the ActivityPub specification which has seen recent attention due to a surge in public interest in decentralised social networks. I also spent a year and a half as the Working Group's Team Contact, which familiarised me with W3C processes and politics.
I spent the years since developing software to support openness and transparency for public good. I have worked with investigative journalists and open data activists, facilitating the efforts of civil society groups, governments, and the private sector internationally. I continue this work as a Director of Open Data Services Co-operative, building and maintaining tools that use the Web to promote civic use of data and fight corruption worldwide. I also work with Digital Bazaar on Web standards related to decentralisation, with the goal of enabling a foundational layer of technologies to support individual agency on the Web.
These experiences at the intersection of civic work and cutting edge standards development give me a unique perspective for my time on the TAG. There is no need for trade-offs between participation and privacy, or between community and autonomy, when building empowering Web technologies. My strengths lie in listening to input from a range of perspectives, discerning the common grounds on which to move forwards, and turning consensus into concrete specification text.
Should my term be renewed, I will continue to advocate for thoughtful and intentional design of web platform features which account for diverse perspectives and usage scenarios, as well as bringing this mindset to specification design reviews.
Find me at rhiaro.co.uk.
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w3c social services
50.28eur (€50.28 / $49.20 / £43.97)
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Week in review: 25th - 31st July
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