Social Web Working Group

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The Social Web Working Group (AKA Social Web WG or Social WG) was a W3C Working Group from 2014-2018 that was chartered with developing specifications (including IndieWeb specifications) for the social web, based on the outcome of the 2013 osfw3c workshop. Since its closure, some Social WG work was continued in the Social Web Community Group (SWICG), and all IndieWeb related specifications are actively developed in the IndieWeb community.

Specifications

Now maintained by the IndieWeb community, see https://spec.indieweb.org/

• Webmention
• Micropub
• WebSub
• IndieAuth
• JF2
• Post Type Discovery

and related specs are maintained by the microformats community, see https://microformats.org/wiki/

• microformats2
• h-card
• h-entry
• h-event
• h-feed

Most of the remainder of the specs were maintained by the Social CG:

• Activity Streams 2.0
• Activity Vocabulary
• ActivityPub

And one is maintained by https://linkedresearch.org/

• LDN

Social CG

Main article: Social Web Incubator Community Group

The Social Web Community Group (Social CG / SWICG) took over maintenance of some of the specifications from the Social Web WG.

Currently there are no regular meetings, though the Social CG used the #social channel on the W3C IRC network (irc.w3.org).

Social WG CG IRC

The Social Web WG & CGs used the #social IRC channel on the W3C IRC network (irc.w3.org).

• Logs: https://chat.indieweb.org/social

History

(this section is a stub)

• 2013-08-07…08 osfw3c workshop — which led to the proposal to explore creating a Social Web Working Group, which led to:
• 2014-07-21 to 2018-02-13 Social Web Working Group duration

The Social Web Working Group had to evaluate numerous prior group efforts (17+) & different approaches (~15) that were proposed by members of the group for consideration before narrowing down to ~2.5 approaches all of which used HTTP & link rel discovery, and then had differences which could be summarized as:

• HTML(+JSON) Web-based: Webmention, microformats2, Micropub, IndieAuth, Post Type Discovery
• JSON(-LD) API-based: Activity Streams 2.0, ActivityPub
• LD Semantic Web based: LDN, the "0.5" that eventually became a building block for Solid, developed outside the WG.

Some evidence of the numerous approaches/technologies/projects that were proposed are on the SocialWG wiki, e.g.:

• Various groups: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg#All_Social_Web_Related_CGs
• Various technical approaches: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/Social_API/Candidates

FAQ

How do I connect to W3C social IRC

• How can I connect to the W3C’s Social Working Group / Community Group IRC channel #social?

Web: https://irc.w3.org/?channels=social or see https://www.w3.org/wiki/IRC for other options.

See Also

• W3C
• social web
• osfw3c
• socialig
• https://spec.indieweb.org/
• to-do: Create a separate Social Web Incubator Community Group (and redirects Social Web Community Group, SocialCG) page and extract content from this page accordingly and leave in place a summary section
• Public mailing list archive (closed) https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/
• Group GitHub org: https://github.com/w3c-social