Profile

SWF has joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to advance open standards for the social web. Evan Prodromou will be SWF’s advisory council representative as he continues in his role as maintainer of the ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 specifications. Extending and expanding the implementation of the ActivityPub is a core area of work for SWF. ActivityPub is the only open standard that can underpin a social web that is truly interoperable, fostering innovation and usability across social platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Ghost, Threads, Flipboard and an increasing number of other online spaces. The SWF and its founders have a history of engagement in the W3C. Evan was co-author on the Activity Streams 2.0 and ActivityPub specifications. As head of digital at ARTICLE 19 and later CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, I’ve engaged as both an invited technical expert and an advisory council member under CDT’s membership on topics related to technical standards and human rights issues. The W3C Social Community Group is the primary vehicle for ActivityPub extensions that provides a structured process for introducing new features and updating the existing specifications. The W3C CGs are open to anyone who would like to join and contribute. SWF joins CDT as one of the few civil society organizations that comprise the Consortium. SWF’s membership in the W3C underscores our commitment to promoting an open and federated social web, and our alignment with the W3C mission to develop web standards through community consensus that ensures the long-term growth and accessibility of technical specifications that are openly licensed. In terms of concrete ongoing work, we look forward to bringing end-to-end encryption to direct messages in ActivityPub, developing groups on the social web, supporting data portability with ActivityPub, making discovery of ActivityPub objects and their authors easier. We’ll participate in ongoing maintenance and development of the core standards. We’ll also work alongside the renowned experts in web accessibility, building with potential companies and organizations who might become SWF supporters, and serving as a voice for the public interest in this important forum for multistakeholder internet governance.