RE: Ongoing Experiments & Results

Let’s focus our discussion on what the charter should say.

The main objective of the group as established was 

“A clearinghouse for experience and guidelines for people who are suddenly called to avoid travel or meetings, work-at-home or do classes online. Focus on current capabilities and future needs.”

And the charter of the group shouldn’t stray too far from that.

I don’t think it’s a good idea that the scope in the charter should restrict the group from passing on advice about considerations for use of conferencing technology even if it only applies to proprietary  solutions.

While a Community Group is under the W3C umbrella, this isn’t a standards group.

At best we might hope that our requirements analysis will be useful for WebRTC/RTCWeb standards efforts, as a secondary output.

I’m hoping to attract product managers from solution vendors as well as open source implementors and users,  to pass on solutions to the a near-term problem that wasn’t part of their near-term plans –  how to transition QUICKLY to online.

At a minimum we should act as a clearinghouse  in the sense of “an agency or organization which collects and distributes something, especially information.” 

Whether the solution is open source/free/libre is important to many users. So that information should be gathered and distributed along with any quirks of implementation.

But in reality, whether something is “open” is complicated, and not just a check box, and I don’t think spending a lot of time determining the claims should be in scope for this group.

The value of a clearinghouse is determined by its speed and accuracy. Don’t get distracted:

Our goal is to collect and distribute information – especially information that isn’t easy to determine by reading marketing information.

Thanks,

LarryMasinter.net