Re: Ongoing Experiments & Results

RE: "I just see so many groups choosing non standards-based solutions
because of platform compatibility, bandwidth limitations causing them to
choose proprietary codecs or other technologies that the result (if it
omitted any solution without there already being an open standard
implementation) wouldn’t be generally useful."

Larry,

The general public has no difficulty locating Skype, GoogleHangouts, Zoom,
etc etc.

The purpose of my suggestion on the IETF list which led to this community
group was so that members from a set of genuine standards bodies assemble a
package that the general public and organizations of any size could use.

The explicit lean towards free/libre/open components is (a) to that any
technological constraints can be addressed without delay by any technically
capably individual or organization, and (b) because organizations in crisis
are not able to undertake their required procurement processes.

In January 2004 when I was Interdepartmental Coordinator or IT Architecture
Methods & Processes in the Government of Canada, I convened a meeting at an
Industry Canada boardroom to discuss the relevance of free/libre/open
licensing and methods for national emergency response. The invited keynote
speaker by video-conference was Martin Krzywinski, who had just published
"Sequencing the SARS Virus" in the November 2003 edition of Linux Journal.
His article remains useful to read today:
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6977   What he explained in the
workshop I chaired was that the free/libre/open licensing enabled his team
to tweak their analytics as creatively abnd promptly as required, without
the need to plod through bureaucratic, inter-company or legal constraints.
(For data science geeks, Martin's ongoing work remains interesting.
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca  https://martin-krzywinski.pixels.com )

Two years prior to the 2007-2008 financial crash, I was a Sr. Economist at
Treasury Board Secretariat, of the Canadian Government. At that time I
commenced business design and technical implementation of the underlying
data centre infrastructure (that for the past 15 years has hosted core
national services such as the Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System
<http://canops.org/masas>, Search and Rescue Canada
<https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/military-operations/types/search-rescue/about.html>,
Buy and Sell Canada <https://buyandsell.gc.ca/>, and others. That
infrastructure is a free/libre/open source 'cloudlet' stack we called the "
High Resilience Environment" (HRE) -- this makes it resilient to a
financial crisis. How?  Because in a financial crisis, companies that
everyone expected were solvent can overnight become onsolvent. When that
happens to companies that own non-standard and restricted source software
which many people and organizations depend on, then that compounds the
impact of the crash.

May I therefore suggest that suppliers of non-standard and restricted
source software solutions for remote meetings, working, classes and
community groups do not require the assistance of the volunteers on of this
W3C CG. They know their market, and they are seeing market balloon by leaps
and bounds presently (which may require extended freebie offers presently,
but which will certain gain loyal customers)

But who out there, would convene a group of not-for-profit standards bodies
to ensure there's an adequate standards-conformant and free/libre/open way
to optimize for business continuity, come what may?

That's what I propose this group can be.

Joseph Potvin


On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 5:43 PM Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org> wrote:

> I re-read my message and realized I didn’t explain well, so let me try
> again.
>
>
>
> Think of an exploration of uncharted territory.
>
> The charter as containing minimum and maximum constraints, as well as a
> schedule and a starting point and a direction.
>
> The “goals” are for direction – where do we want to go.
>
> The “deliverables” are for end-point: how do we know when we’re done.
>
> The “scope” is for setting limits: what things are “out of scope” and
> discussion should be limited to things in scope.
>
>
>
> I wouldn’t want to make use of proprietary software “out of scope”. I’m
> happy to make it a goal that all remote activities can be accomplished with
> open standards and free/libre implementations. But to get closer to the
> goal we need to know where we are, and not rule current state as “out of
> scope”.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Larry Masinter <masinter@gmail.com> *On Behalf Of *Larry Masinter
> *Sent:* Sunday, March 15, 2020 2:13 PM
> *To:* 'Joseph Potvin' <jpotvin@opman.ca>; public-covid-19@w3.org
> *Subject:* RE: Ongoing Experiments & Results
>
>
>
> I didn’t reply to your suggestion about restricting our scope to
> immediately usable open standards-implementing environments, preferably
> free/libre licensed.
>
>
>
> I just see so many groups choosing non standards-based solutions because
> of platform compatibility, bandwidth limitations causing them to choose
> proprietary codecs or other technologies that the result (if it omitted any
> solution without there already being an open standard implementation)
> wouldn’t be generally useful.
>
>
>