Re: historical background regarding success of responses to formal objections

Thanks Liam.
That was well stated, and covers my understanding from discussions across
experienced W3C folks.

I have a hight degree of trust in the DID leadership team to navigate this
well, especially with the help of the guidance from the staff contact.

Michael Prorock
CTO, Founder
mesur.io

On Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 19:53 Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2021-09-13 at 23:26 +0000, Ryan Grant wrote:
> >
> > My question to this group is: historically, how do these things go?
> > Do responses change outcomes?
>
> Sometimes
>
>
> >  Does it work to collect responses into
> > a document?  Do people in the W3C sit down and read all the emails in
> > the mailing list?
>
> You need to make a coherent response. The W3C  team will look at it; if
> necessary, the team (the director) can override the objection,  or in
> some cases the objector says they are satisfied.
>
> In the 17 years i worked at W3C, the formal objections were
> (1) "we [the objector] wanted to be on record as saying this but go
> ahead and publish" (the most common);
> (2) we [the objector] have a product, or are about to ship a product,
> and the feature(s) in  this spec would cause problems in the short-term
> for our product, and that's more important to us than the Web (no-one
> will ever admit to this but it's not uncommon)
> (3) we object to this spec, we prefer another approach, so here's a
> bunch of fake objections to slow things down because we can't share our
> actual business strategy
> (4) we believe there's a technical problem with this spec, but we
> didn't notice it over the past four years despite a last call  review
> (this one is actually rare but does happen)
>
>
> In general you can only satisfy some of these. I'm not going to say
> publicly where i think the Mozilla objection lies, but, i hope the
> editors and chairs have been able to arrange a joint phone call with
> the objector, the outcome of which might be to invite someone from
> Mozilla to join a Working Group call.
>
> The WG response needs to show why the technical points have been
> addressed are or not actually barriers, but it's also helpful if you
> can work out the political or business-related barriers. For example,
> it might just be someone at Mozilla who feels that since blockchain is
> over-hyped there's nothing at all good in it, and anything that goes
> remotely near it is bad. We certainly had objections like that in XML!
>
> Best,
>
> Liam
>
>
> --
> Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
> Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
> XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
> Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org
>
>
>