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W3C Social Web Groups

The Social Web standards emerged from over a decade of W3C work. This page documents the groups involved in their development and maintenance.

Timeline Overview​

GroupPeriodStatus
Social Web XG2009-2010Closed
Social Interest Group2013-2016Closed
Social Web WG (1st)2014-2018Closed
Social Web CG (SWICG)2016-presentActive
Social Web WG (2nd)2026-2028Active

Social Web XG (2009-2010)​

Started: April 6, 2009

The Social Web Incubator Group was W3C's first formal effort to understand and standardize the emerging Social Web landscape.

Key Resources​

  • Final Report — Identified six core frameworks: Identity, Profile, Social Media, Privacy, Activity, and Decentralized Social Networking
  • Wiki — Requirements and use cases
  • Charter
  • Mailing List

Strategic Recommendations​

Proposed Identity in Browser support, Profile Data Coordination, Semantic Web Integration, Privacy frameworks, Federated Social Web Support, and W3C Process Opening (Community Groups).

Social Interest Group (2013-2016)​

Coordinated messaging around social at W3C and formulated strategy for social business and federation.

Resources​

Deliverables​

  • Use-case and Requirements Report
  • Social Architecture Report (survey of technologies)
  • Social Vocabularies (ActivityStreams, RDF)

Social Web Working Group (2014-2018)​

Chairs: Arnaud Le Hors (IBM, previous), Tantek Çelik (Mozilla), and Evan Prodromou (e14N)

Produced the core Social Web standards in use today.

Resources​

W3C Recommendations Published​

  1. ActivityPub (January 23, 2018) — Decentralized social networking protocol
  2. Activity Streams 2.0 Core (May 2017) — JSON-based syntax
  3. Activity Streams 2.0 Vocabulary (May 2017) — Social activity terms
  4. Webmention (January 2017) — Notification mechanism
  5. Linked Data Notifications (May 2017) — Notification delivery
  6. Micropub (May 2017) — Content publication protocol
  7. WebSub — Push notifications (formerly PubSubHubbub)

Social Web Incubator CG (2016-present)​

Chairs: Dmitri Zagidulin and nightpool

Continues and extends development of vocabularies, formats and protocols for the distributed social web.

Resources​

Meetings​

Monthly general meetings on first Friday of each month at 1pm ET

Active Task Forces​

ActivityPub Testing, API, Forum and Threaded Discussions, Data Portability, Trust and Safety, Geosocial, E2EE, HTML Discovery, Remixing and Aggregation

Key Repositories​

Social Web Working Group (2026-2028)​

Chair: Darius Kazemi (W3C Invited Expert)

Re-chartered to maintain existing specifications and potentially adopt new deliverables from incubation.

Resources​

Specifications Under Maintenance​

All targeted for completion by Q3 2026:

  1. ActivityPub
  2. Activity Streams (Core)
  3. Activity Vocabulary
  4. WebSub
  5. Webmention
  6. Micropub
  7. Linked Data Notifications

Tentative Deliverables​

LOLA (Live Online Account Portability) — May be adopted as Recommendation-track specification depending on incubation progress and implementer interest.

Coordination​

Social Web CG, DID WG, JSON-LD WG, IETF (OAuth, HTTP Message Signatures), IndieWeb community

Getting Involved​

Join SWICG​

  1. Visit the SWICG W3C page
  2. Sign up (requires free W3C account)
  3. Subscribe to the mailing list
  4. Join monthly meetings (first Friday, 1pm ET)
  5. Participate in GitHub

Join SWWG​

  • W3C Members can nominate participants
  • Invited Experts can apply through W3C
  • Community Contributors via CLA

Other Ways​

  • SocialHub Forum — Discussions
  • Task Forces — Join specific topics
  • Test Suites — Contribute to testing
  • Implementation Reports — Document implementations

See Also​