Ben Werdmuller
recently published an inspiring and thought-provoking blog post:
“Subscribing to the blogs of people I follow on Mastodon”.
Beyond the insights and excellent developer how-to in his post, I believe it points to something larger: a fundamental thoughtfulness difference between writing rapid short-form posts (whether tweets or toots) and medium or longer form writing (on blogs or journals), and the impact of that difference on readers: that the act of reading more thoughtful writing nudges & reinforces a reader into a more thoughtful state of mind.
If you have not read
Derek Powazek’s watershed blog post
“The Argument Machine”,
I highly recommend you do so. In the nearly ten years since his post, Derek’s hypothesis of Twitter’s user interface design being the ultimate machine to create & amplify disputes has been repeatedly demonstrated.
Derek’s post predated Mastodon’s release by nearly three years. Ironically, by replicating much of Twitter’s user experience, Mastodon has in many ways also replicated its Argument Machine effects, except distributed across more servers.
I’ve witnessed numerous otherwise rational, well-intentioned individuals write reactive posts on Mastodon, exactly what the Twitter-like interface encourages. Quick emotional responses rather than slower, more thoughtful posts and replies.
I’ve seen the artificial urgency of tweets & toots bleed over into emotional essays on public mailing lists. New participants join a list and immediately make entitled demands. Fearful bordering on paranoid assumptions are used to state assertions of “facts” without citations. Arguments are made that
appeal to emotion
(argumentum ad passiones)
rather than reasoning from principles and shared values.
Implicit in Ben’s post, “Subscribing to the blogs of people”
(emphasis mine), is a preference for reading longer form writing, published on a site a human owns & identifies with (a la
#indieweb),
neither silo nor
someone
else’s garage.
The combination of taking more time (as longer form writing encourages) and publishing on a domain associated with your name, your identity, enables & incentivizes more thoughtful writing. More thoughtful writing elevates the reader to a more thoughtful state of mind.
There is also a self-care aspect to this kind of deliberate shift. Ben wrote that he found himself “craving more nuance and depth” among “quick, in-the-now status updates”. I believe this points to a scarcity of thoughtfulness in such short form writings. Spending more time reading thoughtful posts not only alleviates such scarcity, it can also displace the artificial sense of urgency to respond when scrolling through soundbyte status updates.
When I returned from
#W3CTPAC,
I made a list of all the thoughts, meetings, sessions that I wanted to write-up and publish as blog posts to capture my experiences, perspectives, and insights beyond any official minutes.
Yet due to distractions such as catching up on short form posts, it took me over a week to write-up even a
summary of my
TPAC week, nevermind the queue of per-topic notes I wanted to write-up. To even publish that I had to stop and cut-off reading short form posts, as well as ignoring (mostly postponing) numerous notifications.
There’s a larger connection here between
thoughtfulreading,
and finding, restoring, and rebuilding the ability to focus, a key to thoughtful
writing.
It requires not only reducing time spent on short form reading (and writing), but also reducing
notifications,
especially push notifications. That insight led me to wade into and garden the respective IndieWeb wiki pages for
notifications,
push notifications,
and document a new page for
notification fatigue.
That broader topic of what do to about notifications is worth its own blog post (or a few), and a good place to end this post.
Thanks again Ben for your blog post. May we spend more time reading & writing such thoughtful posts.
W3C Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) Meetings 2023
This year’s W3C TPAC (Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee) meetings felt denser in many ways, packed tighter with more topics, and more active participants. There were so many specific things in specific meetings, new connections, victories, new challenges, that in addition to capturing summary notes, I'm considering writing blog posts about each meeting or session.
Nearly all of them have public minutes that document both participants, and a good portion of what was discussed. I have my own notes, and combined with recollected details of what was minuted, I have my own observations to share. I encourage everyone who participated at TPAC (whether in-person or remote) to consider either writing a summary blog post about the experience, perhaps highlighting a few things that stood out, or if there were specific technical discussions that advanced something in a positive direction, or challenges blocking progress, those are worth their own blog posts as well.
TPAC week 2023
took place from Monday
through Friday
,
in
Sevilla,
Spain.
Here is a summary outline of meetings, sessions, and discussions I participated in. Not listed: conversations at breakfasts, morning & afternoon breaks, lunches, dinners, and of course hallways. Unlinked for now, each of these has a calendar event with description, minutes, almost all of which are public.
Monday
WICG (Web Incubator Community Group)
Tuesday
Social Web Incubator CG (community group), AKA
SocialCG or
SWICG
DID WG
rechartering discussion
AC meeting
Vision TF
Fediverse meetup
Wednesday — Breakouts day!
Chartering at W3C
Technical Roadmap at W3C
SocialWeb Test Suite Discussion
SocialWeb Data Portability Discussion
Introducing the Web
Sustainability
Guidelines (WSGs)
Report to Members, Hearing from Members
Technical Plenary reception
Thursday
CSS WG, briefly
Afternoon break:
Solid
charter discussions, use-cases,
IndieWeb Micropub,
ActivityPub
Friday
Social CG planning
Departing conversations & reflections
Those are the sessions & discussions that I found in my notes.
I also met a lot of new people during meetings, meals, and discussions at breaks.
As I write up my notes on specific sessions and their minutes (and hyperlink the above list items), I expect to recall more context and details. If you were at TPAC in
Seville,
I encourage you to write-up your experiences as well, while the thoughts, feelings, and insights are fresh in your mind. By documenting & publishing our collective experiences (using the
#w3cTPAC
hashtag) we can build upon them together.
Running For Re-election in the W3C Advisory Board (AB) Election
Hi, I’m Tantek Çelik and I’m running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to help continue transitioning W3C to a community-led, values-driven, and more effective organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 25 years.
I am Mozilla’s Advisory Committee (AC) representative and have previously served on the AB for several terms, starting in 2013. In the early years I advanced the movement to offer open licensing of W3C standards, and make it more responsive to the needs of independent websites and open source implementers.
At the same time I co-chaired the W3C Social Web Working Group that produced several widely interoperably deployed Social Web Standards, most notably the ActivityPub specification, which has received renewed attention as the technology behind Mastodon and other social web implementations.
The next two years of the Advisory Board are a critical transition period, and will require experienced & active AB members to work in coordination with the TAG and the Board of Directors to establish new models and procedures for sustainable community-driven leadership and governance of W3C.
I believe governance of W3C, and advising thereof, is most effectively done by those who have the experience of actively working in W3C working groups on specifications, and especially those who directly use & create on the web using W3C standards. This direct connection to the actual work of the web and W3C is essential to prioritizing the purpose & scope of governance thereof.
I post on my personal site tantek.com. You may follow my posts there or from Mastodon: @tantek.com@tantek.com.
I have Mozilla’s financial support to spend my time pursuing these goals, and ask for your support to build the broad consensus required to achieve them.
If you have any questions or want to chat about the W3C Advisory Board, Values & Vision, or anything else W3C related, please reach out by email: tantek at mozilla.com. Thank you for your consideration. This statement is also
published publicly on my blog.
Running For The @W3C Advisory Board (@W3CAB) Special Election
Hi, I’m Tantek Çelik and I’m running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to help it reboot W3C as a community-led, values-driven, and more effective organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 24 years.
I am Mozilla’s Advisory Committee (AC) representative and have previously served on the AB for several terms, starting in 2013. In the early years I helped lead the movement to offer open licensing of W3C standards, and make it more responsive to the needs of independent websites and open source implementers. In my most recent term I led the AB’s Priority Project for an updated W3C Vision. I set the example of a consensus-based work-mode of summarizing & providing granular proposed resolutions to issues, presenting these to the AB at the August 2022 Berlin meeting, and making edits to the W3C Vision according to consensus.
I co-chaired the W3C Social Web Working Group that produced several widely interoperably deployed Social Web Standards, most notably the ActivityPub specification, which has received renewed attention as the technology behind Mastodon and other implementations growing an open decentralized alternative to proprietary social media networks such as Twitter. ActivityPub was but one of seven W3C Recommendations produced by the Social Web Working Group, six of which are widely adopted by implementations & their users, five of those with still functional test suites today, almost five years later.
The next 6-18 months of the Advisory Board are going to be a critical transition period, and will require experienced AB members to actively work in coordination with the TAG and the Board of Directors to establish new models and procedures for sustainable community-driven leadership and governance of W3C.
I have Mozilla’s financial support to spend my time pursuing these goals, and ask for your support to build the broad consensus required to achieve them.
You can follow my posts directly from my tantek.com feed or from Mastodon with: @tantek.com@tantek.com
If you have any questions or want to chat about the W3C Advisory Board, Values & Vision, or anything else W3C related, please reach out by email: tantek at mozilla.com. Thank you for your consideration.
W3C TPAC 2022 Sustainability Community Group Meeting
This year’s W3C TPAC Plenary Day was a combination of the first ever
AC
open session in the early morning, and breakout sessions in the late morning and afternoon.
Nick Doty
proposed a
breakout session for Sustainability for the Web and W3C
which he & I volunteered to co-chair, as co-chairs of the
Sustainability (s12y) CG
which we
created on Earth Day
earlier this year.
Nick & I met during a break on Wednesday afternoon and made plans for how we would run the session as a Sustainability CG meeting, which topics to introduce, how to deal with unproductive participation if any, and how to focus the latter part of the session into follow-up actions.
We agreed that our primary role as chairs should be facilitation. We determined a few key meeting goals, in particular to help participants:
Avoid/minimize any trolling or fallacy arguments
(based on experience from 2021)
Learn who is interested in which sustainability topics & work areas
Determine clusters of similar, related, and overlapping sustainability topics
Focus on prioritizing actual sustainability work rather than process mechanics
Encourage active collaboration in work areas (like a do-ocracy)
The session went better than I expected. The small meeting room was packed with ~20 participants, with a few more joining us on Zoom (which thankfully worked without any issues, thanks to the W3C staff for setting that up so all we had to do as chairs was push a button to start the meeting!).
I am grateful for everyone’s participation and more importantly the shared sense of collaboration, teamwork, and frank urgency.
It was great to meet & connect in-person, and see everyone on video who took time out of their days across timezones to join us. There was a lot of eagerness in participation, and Nick & I did our best to give everyone who wanted to speak time to contribute (the IRC bot Zakim's two minute speaker timer feature helped).
It was one of the more hopeful meetings I participated in all week. Thanks to
Yoav Weiss
for scribing
the minutes.
Here are a few of the highlights.
Session Introduction
Nick introduced himself and proposed topics of discussion for
our breakout session.
How we can apply sustainbility to web standards
Goals we could work on as a community
Consider metrics to enable other measures to take effect
Measure the impact of the W3C meetings themselves
Working mode and how we talk about sustainability in W3C
Horizontal reviews
I introduced myself and my role at Mozilla as one our
Environmental Champions,
and noted that it’s been three years since we had the chance to meet in person at TPAC. Since then many of us who participate at W3C have recognized the urgency of sustainability, especially as underscored by
recent IPCC reports. From the past few years of publications & discussions:
2022 W3C member-only Advisory Committee (AC) meeting panel on
Sustainability at W3C (W3C Member-only link)
For our TPAC 2022 session, I asked that we proceed with the assumption of sustainability as a principle, and that if folks came to argue with that, that they should raise an
issue with the TAG,
not this meeting.
In the Call for Participation in the Sustainability Community Group,
we highlighted both developing a W3C practice of Sustainability (s12y) Horizontal Review (similar to
a11y,
i18n,
privacy, security) as
proposed at TPAC 2021,
and an overall venue for participants to discuss all aspects of sustainability with respect to web technologies present & future. For our limited meeting time, I asked participants to share how they want to have the biggest impact on sustainability at W3C, with the web in general, and actively prioritize our work accordingly.
Work Areas, Groups, Resources
Everyone took turns introducing themselves and expressing which aspects of sustainability were important to them, noting any particular background or applicable expertise, as well as which other W3C groups they are participating in, as opportunities for liaison and collaboration. Several clusters of interest emerged:
Technologies to reduce energy usage
W3C meetings and operations
Measurement
System Effects
Horizontal Review
Principles
The following W3C Groups were noted which are either already working on sustainability related efforts or would be good for collaboration, and except for the TAG, had a group co-chair in the meeting!
I proposed adding a liaisons section to our
public Sustainability wiki page accordingly explicitly listing these groups and specific items for collaboration.
Participants also shared the following links to additional efforts & resources:
Noting that since all our work on sustainability is built on a lot of public work by others, the best chance of our work having an impact is to also do it publicly, I proposed that Sustainability CG work in public by default, as well as sustainability work at W3C in general, and that we send that request to the
AB to advise W3C accordingly. The proposal was strongly supported with no opposition.
Active Interest From Organizations
There were a number of organizations whose representatives indicated that they are committed to making a positive impact on the environment, and would like to work on efforts accordingly in the Sustainability CG, or would at least see if they could contact experts at their organizations to see if any of them were interested in contributing.
Igalia
mesur.io
Mozilla
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Washington Post
Meeting Wrap-up And Next Steps
We finished up the meeting with participants signing up to work on each of the work areas (clusters of interest noted above) that they were personally interested in working on. This has been captured on our wiki:
W3C Wiki: Sustainability Work Areas.
The weekend after the meeting I wrote up an email summary of the meeting & next steps and sent it directly to those who were present at the meeting, encouraging them to
Join the Sustainability Community Group (requires a
W3C account)
for future emails and updates. Nick & I are also on the W3C Community Slack #sustainability channel which I recommended joining. Signup link:
https://www.w3.org/slack-w3ccommunity-invite
Next Steps: we encouraged everyone who signed up for a Work Area to reach out to each other directly and determine their preferred work mode, including in which venue they’d like to do the work, whether in the Sustainability CG, another CG, or somewhere else. We noted that work on sustainable development & design of web sites in particular should be done directly with the
Sustainable Web Design CG (sustyweb), “a community group dedicated to creating sustainable websites”.
Some possibilities for work modes that Work Area participants can use:
W3C Community Slack #sustainability channel
public-sustainability email list of the Sustainability CG
There is lots of work to do across many different areas for sustainability & the web, and for technology as a whole, which lends itself to small groups working in parallel. Nick & I want to help facilitate those that have the interest, energy, and initiative to do so. We are available to help Work Area participants pick a work mode & venue that will best meet their needs and help them get started on their projects.
Normally I go into the office on Wednesdays but I had worked from home that morning. I took the bus (#5736) inbound to work in the afternoon, the last time I rode a bus. I setup a laptop on the podium in the main community room to show demos on the displays as usual.
Around 17:34 we kicked off our local Homebrew Website Club meetup with four of us which grew to seven before we took a photo. As usual we took turns
taking notes in IRC during the meetup as participants demonstrated their websites, something new they had gotten working, ideas being developed, or inspiring independent websites they’d found.
Can you see the joy (maybe with a little goofiness, a little seriousness) in our faces?
We wrapped up the meeting, and as usual a few (or in this case two) of us decided to grab a bite and keep chatting. I did not even consider the possibility that it would be the last time I would see my office for over a year (still haven’t been back), and left my desk upstairs in whatever condition it happened to be. I remember thinking I’d likely be back in a couple days.
We walked a few blocks to Super Duper Burgers on Mission near Spear. That would be the last time I went to that Super Duper Burgers. Glad I decided to indulge in a chocolate milkshake.
Afterwards Katherine and I went to the Embarcadero MUNI station and took the outbound MUNI N-Judah light rail. I distinctly remember noticing people were quieter than usual on the train. There was a palpable sense of increased anxiety.
Instinctually I felt compelled to put on my mask, despite only two cases of Covid having been reported in San Francisco (of course now we know that it was already spreading, especially by the asymptomatic, undetected in the community). Later that night the
total reported would be 6.
Yes I was carrying a mask in March of 2020. Since the previous 2+ years of seasonal fires and subsequent unpredictable days of unbreathable smoke in the Bay Area, I’ve traveled with a compact N-95 respirator in my backpack.
Side note: the CDC had yet to recommend that people wear masks. However I had been reading and watching enough global media to know that the accepted practice and recommendation in the East was quite different. It seemed people in Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong were already regularly wearing masks (including N95 respirators) in close public quarters such as transit. Since
SARS had hit those regions much harder
than the U.S. I figured they had learned from the experience and thus it made sense to follow their lead, not the CDC (which was already under pressure from a criminally incompetent neglectful administration to not scare people). Turned out my instinct (and analysis and conclusions based on watching & reading global behaviors) was more correct than the U.S. CDC at the time (they eventually got there).
Shortly after the train doors closed I donned my mask and checked the seals. The other useful advantage of a properly fitted N95 is that it won’t (shouldn’t) let in any funky public transit smells (perfume, patchouli, or worse), like none of it. No one blinked at seeing someone put on a mask.
We reached our disembarkation stop and stepped off. I put my mask away. We hugged and said our goodbyes. Didn’t think it would be the last time I’d ride MUNI light rail. Or hug a friend without a second thought.
Life Happens: Towards Community Support For Prioritizing Life Events And Mutual Care, Starting With The #IndieWeb
“Life Happens” is an acknowledgement that there are numerous things that people experience in their actual physical lives that suddenly take higher priority than nearly anything else (like participation in volunteer-based communities), and those communities (like the IndieWeb) should acknowledge, accept, and be supportive of community members experiencing such events.
What Happens
What kind of events? Off the top of my head I came up with several that I’ve witnessed community members (including a few myself) experience, like:
getting married — not having experienced this myself, I can only imagine that for some folks it causes a priorities reset
having a child — from what I've seen this pretty much causes nearly everything else that isn’t essential to get dropped, acknowledging that there are many family shapes, without judgment of any
going through a bad breakup or divorce — the trauma, depression etc. experienced can make you want to not show up for anything, sometimes not even get out of bed
starting a new job — that takes up all your time, and/or polices what you can say online, or where you may participate
becoming an essential caregiver — caring for an aging, sick, or critically ill parent, family member, or other person
buying a house — often associated with a shift in focus of personal project time
(hat tip: Marty McGuire)
home repairs or renovations — similar to “new house” project time, or urgent repairs. This is one that I’ve been personally both “dealing with” and somewhat embracing since December 2019 (with maybe a few weeks off at times), due to an infrastructure failure the previous month, which turned into an inspired series of renovations
When these things happen, as a community, I feel we should respond with kindness, support, and understanding when someone steps back from community participation or projects. We should not shame or guilt them in any way, and ideally act in such a way that welcomes their return whenever they are able to do so.
Many projects (especially open source software) often talk about their
“bus factor” (or more positively worded “lottery factor”). However that framing focuses on the robustness of the project (or company) rather than those contributing to it. Right there in IndieWeb’s motto is an encouragement to reframe: be a “people-focused alternative to the corporate […]”.
The point of “life happens” is to decenter the corporation or project when it comes to such matters, and instead focus on the good of the people in the community. Resiliency of humanity over resiliency of any particular project or organization.
Adopting such values and practices explicitly is more robust than depending on accidental good faith or informal cultural support. Such emotional care should be the clearly written default, rather than something everyone has to notice and figure out on their own. I want to encourage more mutual care-taking as a form of community-based resiliency, and make it less work for folks experiencing “life happens” moments. Through such care, I believe you get actually sustainable community resiliency, without having to sacrifice or burn people out.
Acknowledging Life Happens And You Should Take Care
It’s important to communicate to community members, and especially new community members that a community believes in mutual care-taking. That yes, if and when “life happens” to you that:
we want you to take care of what you need to take care of
you are encouraged to prioritize those things most important to you, and that the community will not judge or shame you in any way
you should not feel guilty about being absent, or abruptly having to stop participating
it is ok to ask for help in the community with any of your community projects or areas of participation, no matter what size or importance
the community will be here for you when you’re able to and want to return
It’s an incomplete & imperfect list, yet hopefully captures the values and general feeling of support. More suggestions welcome.
How to Help
Similarly, if you notice someone active in the community is missing, if you feel you know them well enough, you’re encouraged to reach out and unobtrusively check on them, and ask (within your capacity) if there’s anything you can do to help out with any community projects or areas of participation.
Thanks to
Chris Aldrich
for expanding upon
How to help and encouraging folks to Keep in mind that on top of these life changes and stresses, the need to make changes to social activities (like decreasing or ceasing participation in the IndieWeb community) can be an added additional compounding stress on top of the others. Our goal should be to mitigate this additional stress as much as possible.
How to Repair
Absence(s) from the community can result in shared resources or projects falling behind or breaking. It’s important to provide guidance to the community with how to help repair such things, especially in a caring way without any shame or guilt. Speaking to a second person voice:
You might notice that one or more projects, wiki pages, or sections appear to be abandoned or in disrepair. This could be for any number of reasons, so it’s best to ask about it in a
discussion
channel to see if anyone knows what’s going on. If it appears someone is missing (for any reason), you may do kind and respectful repairs on related pages
(wikifying),
in a manner that attempts to minimize or avoid any guilt or shame, and ideally makes it clear they are welcome back any time.
If you come across an
IndieWeb Examples section on a page where the links either don’t work (404, broken in some other way, or support appears to have been dropped), move that specific IndieWeb Example to a “Past Examples” section, and fix the links with Internet Archive versions, perhaps at a point in time of when the links were published (e.g. permalinks with dates in their paths), or by viewing history on the wiki page and determining when the broken links were added.
Encouraging More Communities To Be Supportive When Life Happens
When I shared these thoughts with the IndieWeb chat and wiki a couple of weeks ago, no one knew of any other open (source, standards, etc.) communities that had such an explicit “Life Happens” statement or otherwise explicitly captured such a sentiment.
My hope is that the IndieWeb community can set a good example here for making a community more humane and caring (rather than the “just work harder” capitalist default, or quiet unemotional detached neglect of an abandoned GitHub repo).
That being said, we’re definitely interested in knowing about other intentional creative communities with any similar explicit sentiments or statements of community care, especially those that acknowledge that members of a community may experience things which are more important to them than their participation in that community, and being supportive of that.
This blog post is a snapshot in time and my own expression, most of which is shared freely on the IndieWeb wiki.
If this kind of statement resonates with you and your communities, you’re encouraged to write one of your own, borrowing freely from the latest (and CC0 licensed) version on the wiki: life happens. Attribution optional. Either way, let us know, as it would be great to collect other examples of communities with explicit “life happens” statements.
There's a lot I like about the IndieWeb community, but one of the best elements is a constant determination to strive to be better. Their recent adoption of an official "Life Happens" policy is a great example. It's a commitment to recognise that, well, life happens and that being part of an online community, or volunteering time/effort, is never a requirement. That slipping out for a bit is not just okay, but encouraged, whatever the reason. And providing a framework for supporting individuals in the community to whom life is happening.
Being in a “life happens” moment myself (finishing my dissertation), I originally missed Tantek Çelik’s chat conversations & blog post about developing a “life happens” approach to community participation & care on the IndieWeb. I love this idea.