Re: Dissatisfaction with HTML WG

On Jan 10, 2008 9:44 AM, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:

>
> On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 18:08 +0100, Sylvain Eliade wrote:
> [...]
> > What about making goals, like each week deciding to discuss about one
> > specific subject, trying to have a consensus and if not, doing a vote
> > ? That is simple, it's used in many places. Why not try this ?
>
> As I say, each week we update the list of things the chairs want
> the WG to focus on:
>
>  http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/agenda
>
> And yet it seems you have not even noticed.
>
> I'm not sure how to fix that.
>


Oh. Is that what the agenda items are meant to indicate? Clearly the
connection is unclear. :)

What is the story here? To be clear, I believe the main characters here are
all well-intentioned, and I see no evidence of any attempt to subvert or
corrupt the process (such process that there is). Certainly there are
differences of opinion - occasionally heated. As this thread indicates,
something is yet missing.

Someone needs to tell the story, for each story.

Roger Schank <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Schank> (a prominent AI
figure) gave a talk at UCI several years back. His notion was that humans do
not naturally reason deductively, rather we use something he called
"story-based reasoning". In fact most of human communication is in the form
of "mini-stories". This upset the deductive AI people to no end, but to me
seemed to make a great deal of sense. In fact I have used this notion when
doing interviews<http://bannister.us/preston.bannister/ramblings/reasoning.html>to
good result.

What we have here is a lack of communication, and the lack is in that no one
is telling the story.

At an end point or milestone in any discussion there is value in writing up
a summary. The purpose is to bring everyone onto the "same page", so that
all involved are clear on:

   - What was the original question.
   - What alternatives were considered.
   - What (if any) conclusions or consensus was reached.

You would be surprised (though hopefully not) at how often participants are
unclear on at least one of the above points. For a large enough group that
would be *always*.

As the prior messages indicate, the story is not getting told. :)