Re: IG charter: status and schedule

Hi Yosuke and Charles,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments.  Could you please
see inline below for my responses?


On 09/24/2010 02:05 AM, FUNAHASHI Yosuke wrote:
> Hi Charles,
>
> Thank you for your active involvement!
>
> On 2010/09/23, at 2:02, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:01:13 -0400, FUNAHASHI Yosuke
>> <yfuna@tomo-digi.co.jp> wrote:


1. Schedule for the IG Charter
-------------------------------

>>> Actually, I would like to speed-up the process as well.:)
>>>
>>> The most time-consuming process will be `Review by AC Rep.'.
>>
>> Well, that depends on how fast we do our own review of the charter -
>> if we take 5 weeks we might be the slowest step ourselves.
>>
>>> I've heard from Kaz that, theoretically, it can take infinite time
>>> if any of AC Reps continue to reject the charter. So we gave
>>> the process a month as our target of effort.
>>>
>>> I would like to ask Kaz about the minimum duration of the process
>>> the W3C process document requires. I think it would be the best
>>> case we can expect.
>>
>> I think that it can be done in 4 weeks - and could be done alongside
>> the review by this group to speed up the process. If the proposed
>> charter is submitted next week it can still be modified as a result of
>> comments either by the AC or by this group.
>
> I agree with you that we should speed-up all the activities that
> constitute the whole process from creating the charter to finalizing it.
> Time is always against us and everything has its time. As I talked to
> Giuseppe in this ML yesterday, my review and modification for your
> initial draft charter will finish this week. So If anybody on the ML has
> no objection to submit the modified draft charter, things will be able
> to proceed a little bit quickly as you mentioned.
>
> Umm... because this is my first time to join a discussion on W3C mailing
> list, I can't tell what extent I can rely on the so-called "implication
> in sentences". So I would like to write my response a little bit more
> directly.
>
> If you mean that my modification itself should be done after the initial
> draft charter proposed, I am sorry to say that it is not acceptable for
> me from the viewpoint of creating successful Interest Group. I would
> like to explain the reason.
>
> The name and the main topic of the IG is the "Web and TV". So the good
> involvement of the TV industry or broadcasters in the discussion on the
> IG and the following related WG is the key to success. The content of
> the initially proposed IG charter is very important for broadcasters
> whether it is modifiable or not. Where we (decide to) start from has
> significant meaning for them. You may laugh this. But this is the
> mentality of the broadcasters. From this viewpoint, I think the initial
> draft charter needs substantial improvements and now I am working with
> it. If we must spend several months to take care of them, we should just
> ignore them. But if it costs only a few weeks, we had better do it.
>
> In any case my modification will be finished in a few days.

Actually, I'm not that concerned about the schedule itself (or rather
I should say I'm not that interested in the schedule).  I think the
most important part of charter generation is to clarify what will be
done by the group and who will participate in it.  So please don't
worry too much about the schedule but concentrate on the scope,
deliveralbles and participation sections of the draft charter [1]
:)

We're looking forward to comments from Yosuke as well.


2. IG Scope
------------

>> In any case the IG is designed to be fairly uncontroversial - it
>> deliberately defers complex technical and design discussions, along
>> with taking decisions where there isn't clear consensus, to a relevant
>> working group. The IG is more of a place for collecting and recording
>> the range of requirements and issues, to make sure that working groups
>> aren't missing important information.
>
> Generally speaking, dealing with requirements is the most difficult
> process in both software engineering and standardization, especially
> when it concerns multiple industries or multiple domain knowledges. I
> know "Web and TV" is one of the most challenging and difficult topic in
> that sense. I also think it is the very reason why so many project in
> the past about this topic substantially failed.
>
> So we should treat this process carefully, or we should prepare for it.
> For example, in the workshop, the meaning of the some of the important
> technical, business and social science's terms had significant
> differences according to which industry the person is mainly working.
> That prevented the discussions to be more fruitful. Some discussions
> were bounded by it in unbearably naive level. In my opinion, unveiling
> and showing this issue - the issue that resides in communication or
> discussion about "Web on TV" or "Web and TV" among multiple industries -
> to the participants is one of the important achievement of the workshop.
> We had better learn from the workshop.
>
> I think one of the good methodology for successfully managing this kind
> of situation is 1) to build our minimum dictionary or terminology
> specialized for our discussion, 2) to reach the agreement upon it, 3) to
> write and read requirements based on it.
>
> What do you think?

I simply would agree with Charles here that an IG is a place for
collecting and recording the range of requirements and issues. That's
why I believe we should modify the Scope and Deliverables sections of
the initial draft charter [1] a bit and explicitly say "We'll
categorize the topics suggested during the workshop and clarify which
topics should be done by which group."

Please see also my message on the initial feedback from the W3C Management
at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-and-tv/2010Sep/0017.html

If (and only if) there is fatal difference of term usage among the
industries, maybe we should clarify which term is used for what.  But
we should check which terms have problems first.


3. IG Participation (public vs. member restricted)
---------------------------------------------------

>>> * the IG should be public or W3C members only?
>>>
>>> I remember that, in the workshop, someone said that "Interest Group
>>> could be public" but the other person said that "Interest Group also
>>> requires W3C membership to participate in it".
>>
>> An interest group can be open to anyone - and indeed the charter
>> proposal allows anyone to join the interest group. But any work to be
>> done would happen in a working group (either new or existing). This
>> way we can get the widest possible participation in devloping and
>> explaining requirements, and technical work is done in the context of
>> W3C's patent policy, working with experts in Web technology as well as
>> TV industry.
>>
>> Where appropriate, I think it is more effective to do work in an
>> existing working group. E.g. rather than having a seperate group to
>> define TV-oriented device APIs, it makes sense to take advantage of
>> the expertise on defining device APIs for the Web that is in the DAP
>> group. Naturally the group can also recommend the creation of a new
>> working group for items that haven't so far been in the scope of W3C
>> work.
>>
>> There is a separate question about whether the work should take place
>> in publi, or in a member-only group. For the Interest Group I think it
>> is much more effective for discussions to be in public. In any case,
>> this is important to make technical work more efficient.

Please remember there are several ways of participation, i.e., email
discussion, telephone conference and f2f meeting.  So theoretically,
there are several possible ways for public participation in an IG (or
even an WG) including:

Possibility1: The public can join the email discussion and also join
   the f2f/telephone meetings.

Possibility2: The public can join the email discussion but cannot
   join the f2f or telephone meetings.

We need to clarify which style we would use for this IG.


4. Preliminary technical discussion on the mailinglist
--------------------------------------------------------

>>>> In any case I think we can start with some preliminary work even
>>>> before the charter is finalized so that we are able to start
>>>> immediately as the charter is ready.
>>>> What do you think?
>>>
>>> Yes. I agree with you.

Yes, that's possible.  Maybe we can use some identifiers in the
subject to identify which thread discusses which topic, e.g., "[tech]"
and "[charter]".


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-and-tv/2010Sep/att-0006/webTVIGcharter.html


Regards,

Kazuyuki


-- 
Kazuyuki Ashimura / W3C Multimodal & Voice Activity Lead
mailto: ashimura@w3.org
voice: +81.466.49.1170 / fax: +81.466.49.1171

Received on Thursday, 23 September 2010 19:17:48 UTC