Follow up on DCAT comms/comment strategy (was: dxwg-ACTION-108: Draft a short comms strategy to highlight priorities and mechanisms to drive engagement on FPWD...)

In the DCAT sub-group meeting on Wednesday 2nd May, there was a bit of a discussion around how we could stimulate more (and more broad) feedback on the DCAT FPWD. The consensus seemed to be that while the mechanism used for the UCR FPWD was useful, it didn't manage to get an adequate response from the wider community both in the senses of across a wider range of industries/practice areas and across a broader geographical distribution.

There were a number of suggestions that came up in the wider discussion (see minutes at https://www.w3.org/2018/05/02-dxwgdcat-minutes ) and I made a few additional notes.  This email tries to pull them into a more organised form as input to further discussion.  [At the time of writing, this is on the agenda  for the DCAT plenary on Tuesday 15th May which I can't attend - travelling back from the AC meeting - so I offer these notes as input to that agenda item.]

1.  The UCR comment process (using the spreadsheet of contacts to reach out to people and organisations  who should have an interest via a WG member who is a previous contact) did get some traction, but the opportunity to comment does risk only being acted on by the 'usual suspects'.  If we are serious about producing a broadly-based, globally adopted standard then we need to do much more outreach to people who don't yet know they should be interested.  [To be clear, the view in the meeting was that what was done was useful, just not enough]

2. In particular, the geographical coverage of interest/response is heavily balanced towards a small number of geographical areas (predominately EC/Europe) - we need to reach out to America, Asia, Africa.  We could also do with broadening the audience to other practice areas/industries.

3. The github feed is extremely active, so its unlikely to be a good vehicle to tempt people to get involved - that's really what the FPWD is for.  Even there, it's quite a large/detailed doc where readers may miss the message/point in the detail.  The suggestion was raised that we should aim for an  "active, personal engagement strategy to get feedback" with some light touch co-ordination where appropriate (e.g. brief engagement strategy with a timetable)

4. There has been success in prior standards efforts (SDW WG) by using other face-to-face or conferences to publicise the work - look for opportunities where DXWG members have other commitments to attend.  That could also be done when we are visiting partner organisations (obviously where this is appropriate).  An additional suggestion was to proactively reach out to other W3C WG editors/chairs.

5. Providing an easily consumed summary of the kind of changes we plan to the recommendation (and the reasoning behind them) as well as any topics where additional input would help us in the form of (e.g.) a blog post was seen to be a key resource - as would be using things like the W3C twitter feed.  [UCR didn't get mentioned on that, we believe, but no-one on the call was sure on the protocol here]

Those were the main ideas that came up (at least as I noted it down....) so perhaps this can help stir some creative ideas that are both practical and effective.


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David Browning
Platform Technology Architect

Thomson Reuters

Phone: +41(058) 3065054
Mobile: +41(079) 8126123

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