Re: Collecting ideas from the broader community

Hi Dave,

As a general response, my reaction is 'yes'. As a case in point I have been to a meeting yesterday in Beijing with a Chinese organization that imports and exports publications, both traditional and digital; because they do format conversions, because they address the local market, etc, they would definitely have experiences to share. When it came to the question on 'how can we contribute', I was a little bit embarrassed. For very good and understandable reasons, our mailing list is down in the weeds very often and, although it is open, it is still bound to the IG. The github issue list is very good when there are very specific things, comments, and resulting discussions (witness the latest round on the UCR document), but the current repos we have is not really good in raising and discussing general ideas.

We could

- set up a separate github repo for dpub in general (We do have a 'dpub' repository but it has become, primarily, the repo for presentations that some of us give. The repo is now a misnomer, alas!) People could use that repo to also submit experimental code, it has its issue handling that would be aimed at general questions, and the wiki can also be used for longer texts
- set up a discourse topic
- I know I am old skool: we can have a dedicated, and separate, mailing list..

The question is, of course: which of these would be more or less intimidating for people who are not used to these kinds of tools. That is really one of the challenges. "Traditional" developers from the Web world would not particularly care, I believe, if it is discourse or github; they are fine using these (many seems to shun email lists these days…). My concern is more the people like the ones I met yesterday, who have not used github before and I am not sure discourse would be known to them. Maybe we can answer the question: which of those tools are less intimidating?

Another question is which of these tools are good in finding a specific topic of discussion easily later? My experience with email archives is not so good for this, because people do not systematically the right subject; we could use the labeling possibility of github issues. I have *the impression* that discourse if pretty good for this if I look at a page like:

https://discourse.wicg.io/c/css <https://discourse.wicg.io/c/css>

for CSS related things.

Ivan



> On 18 Oct 2016, at 00:26, Cramer, Dave <Dave.Cramer@hbgusa.com> wrote:
> 
> An issue that keeps coming up is finding ways for people to help with our efforts. Most people don’t have the resources or time to join W3C and participate fully. How can we make it as easy as possible for people to contribute their ideas, issues, and priorities? It’s good that anyone can file an issue on GitHub, but that’s still not exactly user-friendly. Having more options would be good, I think. Would something like discourse.wicg.io work for us? Can we just add a category there?
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
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----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Technical Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704