Promised a blog post re: experiences at TPAC

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(I would have just sent this to the chairs and to Ivan, but I recall
that we're STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to send more to the list to see if it
generates discussion, so....)

I took an action item at the TPAC f2f to draft a blog post. I don't know
if this is quite what you're looking for, but here's what I drafted up.
Feel free to edit, post, or toss as you feel appropriate.

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While I’ve been involved in Internet standards development for several
years, this was my first W3C TPAC meeting. The DPUB IG was the primary
reason I attended, but I came in a day early to experience the plenary
day and to see about meeting participants in other groups, particularly
the internationalization and CSS crowd. The time spent was well worth
the price of admittance!

The plenary day started with a panel session featuring Tim Berners-Lee,
Vint Cerf, and Jun Murai, with moderation provided by Jeff Jaffe. After
that lively session, where we learned more about the experiment that
escaped into the wild to become today’s Internet, the unconference
agenda building happened. If you’ve ever been to an unconference, you’ll
understand the controlled chaos of that process. Many people, one
whiteboard, a thousand ideas, all trying to break the laws of physics by
being in the same place at the same time.

One of the breakout sessions, the EPUB Zero discussion
<https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2015/SessionIdeas#EPUB_Zero> brought to us
by Dave Cramer, was standing room only, with the number of bodies
quickly triumphing over local air conditioning. The goal was to
brainstorm what the next generation of EPUB might look like if we
started from a green field. The group focused on the ongoing need for a
manifest or some navigation feature to help organize online and offline
viewing, as well as building in necessary accessibility features, and
having a rich set of metadata to help establish provenance and aid in
archiving the material (as in with a digital library service).

All that was just one session. The DPUB IG met for two more days,
including some crossover with the CSS WG and ARIA. The notes are
available online (<http://www.w3.org/2015/10/28-dpub-minutes.html> and
<http://www.w3.org/2015/10/29-dpub-minutes.html>). As is often the case
with intense face-to-face meetings like this one, we were able to cover
more ground than in our conference calls, and the conversation was
richer for having other subject matter experts from different groups
come in to offer (and receive) feedback on the work at hand. I
definitely appreciated being able to put faces to the IRC handles I’ve
been seeing for the last few months!

All in all, this was a mind-filling experience. The opportunity to spend
multiple days on topics of interest was satisfying (and exhausting), and
I was impressed that participants stayed collegial and focused on the
best end results possible, even in the face of disagreements. The DPUB
IG has quite a bit more work ahead of us, as we try to help the W3C
build an environment that meets the expectations of readers thanks to
thousands of years of publishing and typography expectations. We’re not
going to be bored, and we definitely have more fodder for intense
sessions like what we had at the W3C TPAC last month.

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