[Standards] Participation of civil society in the standardization process + Last Calls

Hi, I saw a talk by Sophia Longwe, who I believe works at Wikimedia Germany, at 39C3 (Chaos Communication Congress). I saw the talk in person, but there is a recording of it here: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-who-runs-the-www-wsis20-and-the-future-of-inter… The talk is a rudimentary overview of how the different bodies that "steer" the internet work t ranging from UN committees and ICANN down to mere mortals such as us. The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) was not called out specifically, but our colleagues at the IETF and W3C were mentioned. In her talk, she criticized the lack of participation from "civil society" in standardization work. She attributed this partially to high barriers to entry at IETF events (high costs, fancy hotels) and said (I’m paraphrasing) that it’s basically just rich FAANG employees. Some of that doesn’t exactly match my own experience at the IETF, but I don’t think any of what she said was in bad faith. I hope to meet her in Vienna (IETF126) to discuss some of these things in person. And who knows, maybe she is right. Anyway, long story short, this got me thinking about our processes here at the XSF (which, again, she didn’t mention at all): I think the XMPP Standards Foundation is in a unique position where many of our members can be described as "civil society" - people who might describe themselves as activists or promoters of XMPP rather than developers. (And/or people who do software development for a living, but whose jobs are unrelated to XMPP and who joined the XSF more in the capacity of a user.) At the same time, I’m observing that a lot of our Last Calls (and standards work in general) have few participants, at least relative to our overall membership numbers. Furthermore, I've heard criticism that the XSF doesn’t take the concerns of some minority groups seriously enough. (Which may or may not be true; I don’t want to take sides on that at this point.) This leads me to a question: Can we kill two or three birds with one stone here? Can we either rephrase some of the questions in the Last Call or add new ones that explicitly invite feedback from "civil society" (for lack of a better word)? I just want to get the discussion started, so I don’t have a final list, but the questions could go in a direction like this: * Would you use this feature if it were implemented in the XMPP client you currently use? * Do you think an implementation of this feature could negatively impact your community? * Does this improve (make easier) the work you do in your community? Cheers, Daniel