w3ctpac (3 out of 3)

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...

🏷 spain vcwg didwg decentralisation web standards w3ctag tag w3c w3ctpac tpac2023 conference travel

Sun 24th of September 2023 at 9:52pm (+01:00)

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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:

• 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.

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.

🏷 web standards activitystreams activitypub indieweb decentralisation social web socialcg w3ctpac w3c tpac2023

Sun 24th of September 2023 at 1:53pm (+01:00)

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Stuck in Madrid for three hours longer than planned/ideal. I couldn't make the reservation that needs to go with the interrail pass for the Madrid-Sevilla train except in-person (myself - tried to send agents in advance, no go) at the station. After standing in line at two different renfe ticket offices before being told "not this ticket office" I waited for 30 minutes at the third to be told the last seat on the 5pm train went to the person in line before me. I blame the massiveness of Madrid station. So my only next option was first class on the 1958, which gets me in way past my bed time. Alas. At least first class was only 3eur extra.

And I have discovered that there are free toilets after the baggage security check. The WiFi at Rodilla cafe near platform 15 works, and the nice person at Rodilla filled my water bottle with ice cold water for me.

🏷 travel w3ctpac tpac madrid spain

Sun 10th of September 2023 at 7:16pm (+02:00)

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