Re: charter and publication wrt W3C Process

Are we making standards or recommending standards or suggesting ways to 
implement standards? What is our product? Daniel, Adam, Sharron, and Owen 
bring up some interesting points.

Making a W3C standard is an arduous process and outside the scope of an 
W3C IG Interest Group.

By recommending standards, I mean suggesting which existing standards 
would best fit a particular situation. A formal W3C recommendation is only 
within scope for a W3C WG(Working Group) which is possible to charter, if 
I understood correctly.  We not only say what standards are out there, but 
provide the recipe for combining the standards into a palatable dish. 
Jose's example of the Mobile Web Best Practices is technically a "W3C 
recommendation" and a best practices document. Its specificity is its 
beauty. If we created a recommendation like that, we'd have to narrow down 
to a very particular topic: such as "Citation Best Practices" or "Data 
Discovery Best Practices".

The third possibility is suggesting ways to implement standards. It would 
be more of an if-then rubric for multiple situations. This is the 
challenge with egovernment. There are a variety of organizational, 
technical and client possibilities. Our howto suggestions would need apply 
to many possible topics and situations.

I am hoping that the next product(s) could go both broad and deep. We 
need a few focused best practice documents (i.e. recommendation) as well 
as something more broad to address the larger egovernment audiences.

Anne Washington


On Wed, 20 May 2009, Daniel Bennett wrote:

> I was thinking that having best practices and having use cases was the most 
> obvious things to do. I think that the "small how-to" project of identifying 
> and exposing OGD is actually a huge, but important project that I encompasses 
> citations and indexing documents (hmmm perhaps schematizing repositories). 
> Citations would be a big win that could help transform access and referencing 
> govt. documents.
>
> Another not-so-small project is to allow for a posting of what various 
> governments are using and the standards they are using or breaking. 
> Legislatures, executive and judicial organizations across the world use 
> different authoring tools that often determine what is published online and 
> how, the success in using standards or being accessible, how the governmental 
> entities index/make searchable/usable the online documents and services, are 
> all datum that we could help be collected. We don't need to even comment on 
> the data collected, just make it reference-able for conversation. And this 
> would help governments find out what software is available, especially if the 
> software was developed internally and could be made available. In the United 
> States alone there are thousands of governments (federal, state, municipal) 
> using different standards and tools with different results, but no place to 
> post and/or search for what they are all doing.
>
> Daniel
>

Received on Friday, 22 May 2009 23:02:27 UTC