Re: Why I don't attend the weekly teleconference (Was: Input on the agenda)

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Shelley Powers wrote:
> >>
> >> If you're part of the team, get with the team. If not, let's end all 
> >> pretense that this group is doing anything effective [...]
> >
> > I don't understand what this has to do with meetings. Could you 
> > elaborate?
> 
> When issues come up in the teleconferences, they're usually put on hold 
> because you're not there to provide either opinion or answer.

Yes, that is another way in which teleconferences suck. They require 
synchronous participation from other people who may not be present, and 
when they're absent, the meeting fails.


> And if you are part of the team, that means that you have to, sometimes, 
> participate in a manner that the team chooses, unless the choice is cost 
> or otherwise prohibitive.

I have described how I believe teleconference meetings to be prohibitive.


> > I have attended literally hundreds of W3C meetings, both 
> > teleconferences and face-to-face, hosted by dozens of chairmen 
> > including many who claimed that they were unusual and were able to 
> > keep meetings productive, and I have uniformly found them to be a 
> > waste of time.
> 
> Then I believe it is in your best interest to work with the chairs of 
> this group to come up with an alternative, or a way to make the meetings 
> useful, rather than disrespect those who spend time and effort trying to 
> make these meetings work.

We have an alternative that works fantastically. It's called e-mail.


> OK, I hereby volunteer to be the editor of the specification related to 
> HTML Tables, and to the part of the specification supposedly addressing 
> issues of semantic metadata.
> 
> I'm serious -- where do I sign up, and when can I get editing rights?

You already have editing rights. Just start writing. You don't have to ask 
anyone's permission. There is plenty of precedent for this; when a spec of 
sufficient quality comes up that replaces a section of the HTML5 spec, I 
remove the text in HTML5 and instead point (if appropriate) to the new 
text. This has happened with XMLHttpRequest, the Selectors API, Window 
(which was later remerged in), the URL parsing and resolving sections, the 
Content Sniffing section, and for a number of other documents that I still 
edit (Web Socket API, Web Socket Protocol, Web Storage, Server-sent 
Events, and Web Workers).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 23:44:59 UTC