DRAFT Social Web Working Group Charter

The mission of the Social Web Working Group is to maintain the W3C Recommendations, as well as related Notes, in the area of the Social Web.

Join the Social Web Working Group.

This proposed charter is available on GitHub. Feel free to raise issues.

Charter Status See the group status page and detailed change history.
Start date [dd monthname yyyy] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved)
End date [dd monthname yyyy] (Start date + 2 years)
Chairs Darius Kazemi (Invited Expert)
Team Contacts [team contact name] (0.1 FTE)
Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: monthly calls may be held
Face-to-face: we will meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 3 per year.

Motivation and Background

In the past few years, the Social Web Incubator Community Group acted as a maintainer for Social Web related specifications published by W3C. This Working Group would maintain the Recommendations and Notes in the Social Web area.

Scope

The Working Group will maintain the ActivityPub, WebSub, Activity Streams, Activity Vocabulary, MicroPub, Linked Data Notifications, and Webmention specifications, as well as related Notes.

Workflow for Active Items

It is important for the health of the group and the quality of review to avoid too much work being scheduled concurrently. For this reason, the Chair(s) may choose to stagger the scheduling of kick-offs, active work, and review of work items, or even defer final Chair and member review of items into a queue, if they feel they cannot adequately supervise the requested work in parallel. The amount of effort and time needed to support work items varies; even for a given work item, support may require more from one Chair than another based on familiarity or expertise, so rather than set a fixed quota, it is expected that Chairs will be open and public about these constraints, and especially clear with Editors and champions in the process of rallying support for items entering that queue.

If there is a substantial amount of work being queued, or if work is ramping up outside the expertise of the current Chair(s), they are invited to recruit additional Chairs and call elections for an additional co-Chair.

Deliverables

Updated document status is available on the group publication status page.

Normative Specifications

The Working Group will maintain the following W3C normative specifications:

ActivityPub

Draft state: Recommendation

Expected completion: Q3 2026

Activity Streams

Draft state: Recommendation

Expected completion: Q3 2026

Activity Vocabulary

Draft state: Recommendation

Expected completion: Q3 2026

WebSub

Draft state: Recommendation

Micropub

Draft state: Recommendation

Linked Data Notifications

Draft state: Recommendation

Webmention

Draft state: Recommendation

Tentative Deliverables

Depending on the incubation progress, interest from multiple implementers, and the consensus of the Group participants, the Working Group may adopt the following document as Rec-track specification:

LOLA

LOLA is a proposal for live online account portability between two ActivityPub servers at the request of a user.

Draft state: CG Draft

In coordination with the Social Web Incubator Community Group, the Working Group is expected to follow the CG/WG Proposal Stages.

Success Criteria

In order to update the Recommendation, each substantive change is expected to have at least two independent implementations of every feature defined in the specification, where interoperability can be verified by passing open test suites, and two or more implementations interoperating with each other.

Each substantive change should contain a section detailing all known security and privacy implications for implementers, authors, and end users.

To promote interoperability, all changes made to specifications should have tests.

This group is expected to be guided by the following documents:

Coordination

For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review.

W3C Groups

Social Web Incubator Community Group

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.

This group is expected to coordinate with the Social Web Incubator Community Group on consensus-based proposals related to content changes for the Social Web Working Group Deliverables. The Chairs of this group should reject proposals that are incompatible with this Charter.

External Organizations

None

Participation

To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.

The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.

The Chairs should periodically look through the non-Members who have contributed to the Working Group and consider whether each one should be invited to participate as an Invited Expert. If a non-Member contributor would like to participate in meetings, they are encouraged to apply to be an Invited Expert. Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Conduct.

Communication

Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Social Web Working Group home page.

Most Social Web Working Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

This group primarily conducts its technical work on the public mailing list public-socialweb@w3.org (archive) or on GitHub issues. The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work.

The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.1, Consensus). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period of one week, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 5.2.3, Deciding by Vote) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 May 2025). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.

Licensing

This Working Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 3.4 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Charter History

The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 4.3, Advisory Committee Review of a Charter):

Charter Period Start Date End Date Changes
Initial Charter 2014-07-21 2016-12-31
Charter Extension 2017-01-01 2017-06-30 none
Charter Extension 2017-07-01 2017-12-31 none
Charter Extension 2018-01-01 2018-01-31 none
Rechartered TBD TBD + 2 years Added LOLA in scope, link to the CG/WG Proposal Stages.

Change log

Changes to this document are documented in this section.