Re: Leading the Forefront - with IRC ! ?

On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 13:44 +0200, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2007, at 12:38, Gavin Pearce wrote:
> > This might be just me, but considering we're meant to be leading the
> > forefront of internet technologies, everything seems rather dated.
> >
> > IRC and an old school mailing list? We must be able to find a  
> > better way to
> > put together something as major as we're working on!

I share your passion for better collaboration tools, Gavin.
I seem to have 22 bookmarks on the topic.
  http://del.icio.us/connolly/collaboration

Thanks, Marcos, for the pointer to "The Social Life of Paper"
http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_03_25_a_paper.htm
It's been in http://del.icio.us/connolly/toread 
since 2005-07-13; now it's #23 in collaboration.

Oh... I also seem to have about a dozen blog entries
tagged collaboration
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/taxonomy/term/21

and I started/helped with a number of related ESW wiki topics...
http://esw.w3.org/topic/InternetRelayChat
http://esw.w3.org/topic/JabberChickenEgg
http://esw.w3.org/topic/MeetingRecords
http://esw.w3.org/topic/ConnectingAudiences
http://esw.w3.org/topic/ScheduledTopicChat
http://esw.w3.org/topic/AdvancedDevelopment

And there's stuff like http://dm93.org/z2001/RemotePresence in my
personal wiki, though I'm divesting from that thing...

  "A personal wiki is an oxymoron; the wiki genre is all
   about collaboration"
   -- my advogato diary, 10 Jun 2005
   http://www.advogato.org/person/connolly/diary.html?start=25


All that said, Henri puts it well...

> Email and IRC have optimized client software available for a wide  
> variety of platforms and user tastes. In addition, they allow users  
> to run their own scripts on incoming messages. OTOH, with Web forums,  
> you are stuck with whatever UI the particular implementation  
> provides. The mailing list is the forum. The IRC channel is the  
> online chat service. The Web site is the open issue board.

In particular, http://www.w3.org/html/wg/il16 is what I'm
using as an issues list. That's may answer to "Can anyone
truly tell me exactly what stage we are at, every idea
we have had already, and peoples views on that idea?"
in Gavin's message of 23 Mar 2007 11:57:14 -0000. Of course
it doesn't capture _every_ idea, but I suggest that's
part of the dynamics of working together and filtering
the zillions of ideas down to one standard. 


I'm interested to learn about http://wiki.whatwg.org/ , i.e.
that there's a mediawiki installation in use by the WHATWG.
I hope it grows OpenID support sometime soon...

  "Please, don't ask me to manage another password!"
   -- OpenID, verisign, and my life: mediawiki, bugzilla, mailman,
roundup, ...
   by connolly on 2006-07-31
   http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/154

And I really like the mfbot deely that reports changes
to the microformats wiki into the #microformats channel
in real-time (http://microformats.org/wiki/irc ).
And likewise http://cia.vc/ for announcing commits into a channel.

> Let's stick to the mailing list and the IRC channel.

In particular, the only thing that all of us have agreed
to is the mailing list.


On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 10:38 +0000, Gavin Pearce wrote:
> Chair's comments especially for where we stand regarding W3C rules &
regs.

IRC is a convenient supplement that W3C happens to support;
but per our charter, like face-to-face meetings and
teleconferences, anything that happens there has to get airtime
by email before it can stick.

http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html#communication

On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 15:21 +0000, Gavin Pearce wrote: 
> Just awaiting a chairs response tbh mainly as for the legal standing of
> using a companies services to develop this, are we allowed to do that? Say
> someone offered us free web hosting, is that OK etc ?

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Regardless of dollars-and-cents
price, with any other service provider than W3C, there are questions of privacy,
long-term archive stability, etc. etc. etc. One of the reasons that
W3C moves slowly when it comes to new collaboration technology is
that we have to work through all the social as well as technical
aspects.


>  Or if we used phpBB
> for example ... is that allowed? Or is someone somewhere going to be
> screaming unfair advantage one way or another.
> Once I know the legal standing, I'll email a few companies/open source
> software ... seeing what we can get sorted.

I think a certain amount of experimentation is healthy, and if
consensus develops around some alternatives, we might perhaps
look into using them more officially. As to someone
"screaming unfair advantage," indeed, consensus
is not easy to come by in a group this large. While collaboration
mechanics are an important aspect of this group, our
main priority is developing HTML standards.



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 23 March 2007 19:01:37 UTC