Regarding start of Community Group beta today (2011-06-28)

Hi all,

I am looking forward to starting the beta period for Community and Business Groups today. Thank you to those who have send me titles and descriptions for your groups. We will be adding those to the system. When everything is in place and "cleaned up" I'll write to let you know that we're underway. I expect this later today Chicago time.

Here's what I expect you will be able to do during the beta:

 1) Join these groups. This involves making a licensing commitment (even in beta). All this should be obvious through the UI, and if it is not, we'll fix it.

 2) Start using mailing lists, blog, and wiki for discussions, writing, and so forth. The lists and wiki are not new pieces of infrastructure, but the blog (WordPress) is. There are features for polls, events, and obviously generic blogging. I look forward to hearing your feedback on using a blog to create news for your group home page.

 3) Check out the site; look for bugs, missing information, etc. Please use public-council@w3.org to share your observations and bug reports.

Here's what you won't be able to do during the beta:

 1) Publish documents. Of course, that does not prevent you from writing things down in a wiki. But we are developing a webmaster-free publications tool and we've not implemented it yet. I hope to have it at launch or shortly thereafter.

Please note that these resources and tools will be public but not loudly announced. Therefore, I would like to request that, while you should certainly invite people to participate in your groups, that you not do broad announcements for the time being.

I will be announcing publicly (via the W3C blog) the start of the beta (but not pointing to the site). In the post I plan to let people know that we are doing a beta and that the public launch will take place around 25 July.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Ian

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 14:21:09 UTC