This topic is a starting point to consider best-practices for the design and evolution of open standards by the commons and tailored to the grassroots environment’s social dynamics.
Inspiration for this topic is the standardization surrounding the ActivityPub family of protocols. While in January 2018 W3C ActivityPub v1.0 became a W3C Recommendation there was no good process in place to responsibly evolve the specifications. Since then a large amount of protocol decay has stifled innovation and slowed adoption rate, offering a complex and unattractive ecosystem for new entrants.
An opposite approach is followed by Solid project, where there is excessive focus on specifications but less on maturing an ecosystem and fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem around the standards. New entrants face the choice to go all-or-nothing on embracing the full set of standards.
Both ActivityPub and Solid are on pathways that see non-linear growth of complexity.
