- From: Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:18:17 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org
And here I thought the IETF AtomPub effort seemed chaotic. :-) At the moment, the way that this working group is operating is that people are bringing in new ideas, they are being debated on the spot, some make it directly into the document, others are placed on the list, and still others go nowhere at all. We started with a bootstrap which did not have a rationale document, and this process hasn't changed. All that has changed is that the W3C has imposed additional chairs which increase the workload, and (to me at least) further confuse the flow. This understandably leads to an overworked editor, appearances of the potential for impropriety, and disenfranchised contributors ("hey he got his input in, but I did not, what gives?") The way the IETF AtomPub working group normally operated was that all participants could bring forward issues and suggestions (as they do here). The secretary's role was to capture and schedule topics. The chairs had multiple roles: they determined when the secretary scheduled the next round, the made determinations of consensus, and they acted as the first point of escalation -- more on that at the minute. The editors "normal" role was to make the changes that the chairs directed. That's how things normally (or nominally) worked. Now lets look at the two significant ways in which things were allowed to deviate from that: conflict and opportunistic optimization. If the secretary wasn't doing his/her job: this could be escalated to the chairs. If the editors didn't do his/her job: this could be escalated to the chairs. If the chairs didn't do their job, escalation continued up the <insert-standards-body-here> chain. But given the separations and the checks and balances that this organization of roles naturally created, escalation was comparatively rare. The other way that the process routinely deviated was opportunistic optimization. The secretary can opt to not add to the list things that were never seriously discussed -- generally because the person who brought up the original issue or suggestion retracted it before it got that far and no other proponents emerged. The chairs can preemptively take items from the list (and even ones not on the list) and make determinations of consensus at any time. The editor can also fold in changes out of cycle; while nominally this was meant only for "editorial" changes, in practice the line is rarely that clear as you might think, and in reality editors could make any change that they thought would be unlikely to be challenged by the work group. The sum total of the workload of officers the working group goes up slightly with the addition a secretary, but in a way that very much is in line with the economics of an all-volunteer effort; in particular the workload of the editor and the chairs doesn't increase, and may in fact substantially decrease. The more substantial change is that (1) what has and has not been decided, and (2) the process for getting ideas into the queue for a consensus call to be made, are both made much clearer. Additionally, people who can't keep up with the firehose of mailing lists such as these can instead chose to limit their scanning to scheduled cycles, and participate further only when topics of interest to them are being decided. I could give concrete examples of how this could apply to some of the current, at times emotional, discussions, but I hope that the application is pretty obvious and my goal with this post to the mailing list is to reduce rather than reinforce the level of emotion. - Sam Ruby
Received on Friday, 24 August 2007 12:18:50 UTC