Re: Group merge?

On Monday, October 10, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:
> Marcos has stated that another group, 'Data driven standards' have
> goals very similar to ours.
>
> Anyone have any thoughts on this idea? Pro or con?

Hi Dave, Marcos and the rest of the CWCG... :)

A little background on why we'd like to see the two groups merge:

The RDFa WG has just recently butted heads with Google on something
related to RDFa 1.1. The conversation[1][2] went something like this:

Google: People are using RDFa incorrectly.
RDFa WG: Do you have data to prove that?
Google: Yes we do.
RDFa WG: Can we see it to verify it?
Google: No, do the Web crawl yourself.

These sorts of conversations put W3C WGs in incredibly awkward
positions. We can choose to ignore the input, but at the peril of Google
not supporting the technology - no group can afford to say no to Google.

I've noticed these types of conversations a number of times in different
groups over the past several months/years and the truth of the matter is
that most language designers are flying blind when it comes to knowing
how languages like HTML, CSS, RDFa, Microdata and a variety of other
author-facing technologies are being used in the field.

This is a problem for the RDFa WG because we have now put the RDFa 1.1
Last Call on hold /indefinitely/ until somebody can dig up some data to
prove or disprove Google's claim.

I'm going to publicize this post tomorrow at 10am, launching the Data
Driven Standards Community Group:

http://manu.sporny.org/2011/data-driven-standards/

I'd like to see this group merge into the Data-Driven Standards group.
The only reason for the migration from this group to the Data-Driven
Standards Group is the name (I did a quick poll among a number of people
and asked them to describe what the "Colloquial Web" group did vs. the
Data Driven Standards group). A number of people (non-native English
speakers) didn't understand the nuances of what "Colloquial" meant and
the ones that did, thought that "Data Driven Standards" was a better name.

Everything else on how this group operates would stay the same - Dave
would continue to chair. We just need to get the group setup and
launched quickly... we have a definite set of work that needs to be done
and a fairly short timeframe to accomplish it in.

So, we're going to be launching the Data Driven Standards group tomorrow
- please join us over there if you'd like to take part in this
Google/RDFa work. The two groups are really doing very similar work - we
really should merge them (and use the CG name that is more descriptive).

Thoughts? Is there anyone that feels strongly against merging into the
"Data Driven Standards" CG?

-- manu

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2011Oct/0115.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2011Oct/0120.html

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Standardizing Payment Links - Why Online Tipping has Failed
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/payment-links/

Received on Monday, 7 November 2011 05:34:33 UTC