Re: W3C Community Group

Hi Christophe,

Just a note re this:

If we look at the "Datapipelining Community Group" members, only 4 of them
> are active in the XProc 3 group ; we have never seen others, except we had
> a skype talk with you during Prague session.


There was also a meeting in Amsterdam last year, which I tried to attend
through Google Hangouts as I recall it. It didn't work, as the connection
was through Gerrit's phone and the signal quality was, shall we say,
suboptimal. Nic, I believe, had meant to be there but unforeseen
circumstances happened.

It should also be pointed out that the Amsterdam meeting was in doubt
practically until the last minute. I emailed Norm the night before and he
wasn't sure.

If I had been properly aware of the Prague meetup in time, I would have
attended it. XProc is important to me, I use it daily, and I really want to
help bring about a new version. The fault was partly mine--it seems that
this email wasn't subscribed to xproc-dev and I had more or less assumed
that I'd hear about the next meeting through other channels. I did not,
which was unfortunate.

This is not to point fingers but to say that so far, the overall
communication could be better. What both me and Nic are trying to find out
here is if the community group can serve a purpose, such as spreading the
word and providing help and info to all XProc users, not just the ones
subscribing to a W3C list. Communication is a good thing and I believe
there's no such thing as too much of it.

As for working under W3C authority, how do you envision this? Actually
joining W3C is too expensive for quite a few of the potential XProc users,
certainly for independent contractors such as myself, and I believe that's
one of the reasons to why the community group happened.

All the best,

/Ari


On 7 March 2017 at 09:26, Christophe Marchand <
christophe.marchand@contactoffice.net> wrote:

> The response to your question is in the "to" header of your mail ; there
> is a mailing list for the datapipelining group, but you've used the
> xproc-dev list...
> ;)
>
> Christophe
>
> Nic Gibson <nicg@corbas.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Christophe
>
> I’m aware of that - Norm and the committee asked Ari and I to consider the
> future of the community group and what it should do. Hence the email
>
> nic
>
> On 7 March 2017 at 08:18:23, Christophe Marchand (christophe.marchand@
> contactoffice.net) wrote:
>
> There is an active group who decided in Prague 2017 to work on XProc 3.0.
> This group is about 12 people who are really concerned by XProc, and are
> active. The Prague session ended on defining goals and responsabilities.
> If we look at the "Datapipelining Community Group" members, only 4 of them
> are active in the XProc 3 group ; we have never seen others, except we had
> a skype talk with you during Prague session.
>
> So, datapipelining community group does nothing, the members - except 4 of
> them - are not active, and there is no reason to keep this group, or keep
> thinking it is related to XProc (that was the purpose of the CG at the
> beginning).
>
> But, I think the XProc 3.0 group **must** work under W3C authority, as
> XProc was a W3C Working Group, and as we work on language evolutions.
> Should it be a community group, a working group, or anything else, I do not
> know enough on W3C groups organizations and responsabilities, so I do not
> have an opinion. But, as nobody (except Norm) in group is a W3C member,
> it'll be difficult to build a working group.
>
> I've been volunteer to work on XProc documentation. In my message on this
> list, the feb, 14th, I explain I'm on reviewing the existing documentation,
> to produce an updated, useful, educational documentation. The WHERE has not
> been yet discussed, but the goal is actually to have a central source for
> documentation, tutorials, FAQ, CookBook, and whatever uesful.
>
> I actually think we must work under W3C authority. We met Bernard Gidon (
> bgidon@w3.org) & Francois Daoust (fd@w3.org) last week, and they
> encourage us to join W3 to work on normalization, "as (we) do on XProc"
> (tr. FR).
>
> @Liam, your opinion ?
>
> Best,
> Christophe
>
> Nic Gibson <nicg@corbas.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> As some people are aware, there is a W3C Community Group (
> http://www.w3.org/community/datapipelining/) related to XProc that has
> been effectively moribund due to Ari and myself not being terribly full of
> free time and our lack of a particular vision for the group.
>
> A week or two ago Ari and I met up to discuss this* and we came up with a
> few ideas. We are taking the fact that there is no longer a formal working
> group as the basis of our thought processes.
>
>
> So, we’d like feedback on the following thoughts
>
> 1) Could the community group be used to organise the ‘home’ of XProc
> online? Currently, there is xproc.org, exproc.org, the w3c site, Gerrit’s
> site, github and probably some other sites
> 2) Could we merge some of the online tutorials and host them on the
> community group wiki?
> 3) We wonder if it would be a good place to gather uses cases and feature
> requests (for the language itself, not the implementations).
>
>
> Finally, should the group actually exist? I’m not convinced either way. It
> *does* need to be renamed if it continues to exist. Data Pipelining Uses
> Cases doesn’t exactly slip off of the tongue.
>
>
> nic
>
>
> * and, unfortunately, to get Ari’s phone stolen.
>
>