Re: Thoughts on WAWG F2F + I Annotate next spring

Hi, Tim–

On 11/20/14 6:24 PM, Tim Clark wrote:
>
> Yet I have to say - I think there is a potential concern about
> balance here. Is this a W3C group or an Hypothes.is group?

This is a W3C Working Group, and I would ask that you respect that.

Singling out a particular organization for anything besides its 
implementation or technical contributions is dangerously close to ad 
hominem or even slander, and we actively discourage such behavior on 
W3C's mailing lists, for obvious reasons. It leads to ugly email threads 
which never end well, for any of the participants. If you have concerns 
about any particular organization or its behavior, you can bring it up 
to the chairs and staff contacts; if that doesn't satisfy you, you can 
escalate it to the Domain Lead (Ralph Swick, who you've CCed here), or 
even up to the Director.

I ask for all mailing list participants to refrain from using the public 
lists in this way, and not to respond further in public on this 
sub-thread; you can follow up on team-annotation@w3.org if you wish.

Further, failing some evidence of misconduct, your concerns seem neither 
substantiated nor specific. It is common (in fact, expected) practice 
for a member organization to host F2F meetings, quite often associated 
with an event on a related topic (as cited before, the SVG WG always 
meets around the SVG Open/Graphical Web conference, hosted by one member 
or another); this is neither a conflict of interest nor an example of 
undue influence. Suggesting otherwise damages the harmony and 
credibility of the working group.

To put this idea to bed, here are the facts at hand:

1) Ivan Herman and I drafted the original working group charter; we 
discussed the potential deliverables informally with many different 
people, including some Hypothesis folks, but also including active 
individuals in the Open Annotation Community Group, as well as browser 
implementers and others; nothing about the deliverables reflects 
anything specific to a single implementation. In fact, it doesn't even 
reflect the current architecture of Annotator (either the main branch or 
the Hypothesis fork).

2) The charter was discussed by the annotation community and public at 
large at a workshop hosted by Hypothesis, but Hypothesis employees were 
dwarfed by the number of other attendees [1] (by more than an order of 
magnitude), in both the number of people and the discussion.

3) The main spec that's been discussed thus far is the Web Annotations 
Data Model spec. This is in no way a product of Hypothesis nor 
Annotator; in fact, Annotator doesn't currently support the data model, 
though Rob Sanderson and Stanford did work with Hypothesis to make a 
patch for Open Annotation support, on the grounds that it wouldn't be 
suitable for use by this WG unless it consumed this group's dogfood. The 
editors of that spec, the ones with the most influence on its 
development, are Rob Sanderson and Paolo Ciccarese, neither associated 
with Hypothesis.

4) The Hypothesis Annotator codebase was chosen as the basis for an 
experimental spec annotation system, because it was the only one I could 
find that had the features we needed, including the requirements that it 
be open source and that it run in the browser. We discussed other 
requirements with the chairs (and the chairs and editors of other 
working groups) at length.  Hypothesis volunteered an enormous amount of 
time to helping us customize, upgrade, and install Annotator; certainly, 
that might help their reputation, but so does any system that W3C 
uses... nobody has accused the WikiMedia Foundation for undue influence 
at W3C because we use MediaWiki. Because we insisted that it support 
import and export of Open Annotations to other systems, and email 
archiving of all annotations, you can use any OA-supporting annotation 
client with the spec annotations.

5) Ivan and I are also concerned with the group balance, not only in the 
representation of organizations, but also in technology stack choices. 
We try to reach out to various potential stakeholders to achieve this 
aim. We asked Frederick Hirsch to co-chair along with Rob Sanderson, so 
we could get a balance between the existing co-chairs of the Open 
Annotation WG (which leans toward Linked Data) and the browser world. 
(We approached both Rob and Paolo, who would probably be equally good, 
and Rob had more time available.) When asked (along with several other 
members) if they would be interested in putting forth a nominee for 
chair of the Web Annotation Working Group, Dan Whaley declined, saying 
that he was concerned with the group balance. In fact, Dan is very 
sensitive to this issue; I hope he doesn't mind that I reveal that he's 
asked Ivan and me offlist if he should limit their participation at 
TPAC, if they should offer the space for a WG f2f, and other questions 
of balance. I made the judgment call that none of these negatively 
impact the activity of the working group, nor show any impropriety, 
because they don't exert any undue influence over the technical work of 
the group's deliverables. If you question my judgment on this issue, I 
am available at your convenience for a personal call.

6) I have never seen anyone from Hypothesis nor Annotator try to 
"dictate terms" to the group, or put forth any argument for a position 
other than a technical one. I sometimes don't agree with their positions 
(I've had some good arguments with Randall, Nick, and Kristof), but I 
respect the technical basis and experience for these positions.

7) If anyone else wants to volunteer resources (WG roles like editor or 
test lead), or to host a F2F or other event, then we would welcome that 
just as much as we would any such offer from Hypothesis. I have yet to 
see any such offers.

8) Annotator is an open-source project that has many other contributors, 
not just Hypothesis; in fact, Hypothesis uses some of its grant money to 
fund other contributors on independent extensions and uses. It's neither 
proprietary nor completely controlled by Hypothesis.


I'm not singling you out in this email, however; from time to time we 
see accusations of unfairness (and obviously, this boils my blood). If 
someone accused Harvard of undue influence because one of the editors of 
the spec is affiliated your organization, I would just as quickly 
dismiss and declaim such influence, and staunchly defend Paolo's 
credibility, character, and technical ability. The same for Rob 
Sanderson, who is both editor and co-chair, which some might see as 
undue influence. I don't want any working group participant to feel 
reluctant to contribute and speak freely because of their association or 
role. Such a chilling effect is poison to the group. People should argue 
their technical positions in full confidence that they are being 
evaluated on their merits.

I hope I've made it clear that I won't tolerate any accusations of any 
organizations or individuals on this list; I won't even abide 
accusations off-list unless they show evidence of improper behavior, or 
behavior that negatively impacts the group.

</rant>

[1] http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html#attendees

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Friday, 21 November 2014 01:25:31 UTC