Re: Co-Chair Announcement

Hi all,

I would like to take a brief moment to thank each and every one of you for
the opportunity to serve this community in my time as co-chair. It was a
privilege to play a role in the inception of MNX, and to see it begin to
take shape in the last couple of years. I have appreciated talking and
thinking with you so much, and have learned a great deal in the process.

I'm also completely thrilled that Adrian Holovaty has accepted a new role
as co-chair. This is a very good change; I know Adrian will add a great
deal of his energy and technical depth to the chairing of the group.
Congratulations, Adrian!

While I will probably be unable to devote the kind of attention to the
group that I have in the past -- which, in honesty, has been true for a
while -- but I'm planning to remain a member and lurk a bit.

Anyway, thanks again and I wish you all the best for this holiday season!

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz



On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 12:41 PM Michael Good <mgood@makemusic.com> wrote:

> We are pleased to announce the appointment of Adrian Holovaty, CEO and
> founder of Soundslice, as co-chair of the W3C Music Notation Community
> Group, joining existing co-chairs Michael Good of MakeMusic and Daniel
> Spreadbury of Steinberg. Joe Berkovitz, founder and CEO of Noteflight and
> more recently of Risible LLC, is stepping down as co-chair.
>
> We would like to express our deepest thanks to Joe for his contributions.
> Joe was instrumental in founding the Community Group and bringing MakeMusic
> and Steinberg to the W3C, showing them the benefits of developing MusicXML
> and SMuFL here. He has also been the driving force in the development of
> the MNX spec to this point.
>
> After leaving Noteflight at the end of 2017, Joe has wanted to devote more
> of his time to both his artistic pursuits and family matters. After he
> indicated to the other co-chairs that he planned to step down, Michael and
> Daniel have been discussing how to keep the group’s efforts moving forward.
>
> We are delighted that Adrian has agreed to help us drive MNX forward from
> here. Adrian has been an active member of the Community Group since its
> inception. He is not only the CEO of Soundslice but is also the co-creator
> of the Django Python framework. Adrian has invaluable experience in
> developing web-based music notation software and in shepherding large-scale
> projects. We are very fortunate to be able to call upon his expertise.
>
> Although we believe most everybody in the community is already familiar
> with Adrian, we asked him to write a few words by way of introduction:
>
> Hi everybody! Adrian here. I’m excited to play a bigger part in this
> community and help improve the lives of developers of music technologies
> around the world — and, most importantly, the musicians who use these
> technologies.
>
> Professionally, I’ve been a full-time web developer since 2002. My largest
> contribution so far has been co-creating the open-source Django Web
> framework, used by many developers these days. I implemented much of the
> framework’s original code and helped build a thriving community of
> contributors.
>
> Since 2012, I’ve been working full-time on Soundslice, a website that
> helps people learn and practice music. It has its own notation rendering
> engine and imports/exports various notation formats, so for better or worse
> I’ve acquired a deep technical knowledge of Western musical notation and
> tablature.
>
> I live in Amsterdam and gig a few times a month with various gypsy-jazz
> bands. I also post videos of guitar performances to YouTube at
> youtube.com/adrianholovaty <https://www.youtube.com/adrianholovaty>.
>
> We can now turn our attentions to our plans for 2019. In the immediate
> term, we will publish the final community report for SMuFL 1.3 (the change
> in version number from 1.2 to 1.3 is merely symbolic, and no significant
> new development work beyond what has been done to date will be undertaken).
> We are also in the process of organising community meetings at the NAMM
> Show in Anaheim, California at the end of January and at Musikmesse in
> Frankfurt at the beginning of April.
>
> Our goal for 2019 is to deliver a draft 1.0 version of the MNX-Common and
> MNX-Generic specifications by the end of the year. We believe that we have
> a solid foundation in terms of the basic musical structure for CWMN, and we
> will next turn our attention to some specific representation challenges
> before we then attempt to fit other MusicXML elements for specific
> notations into the framework. These specific representation challenges
> include:
>
> • How pitch should be encoded, and whether MNX-Common documents should
> always be in written pitch or sounding pitch.
> • How, or to what extent, MNX-Common documents should encode multiple
> presentations for the same musical material, e.g. the full score versus
> instrumental parts, and the differences between them, such as page and
> system breaks, differences in enharmonic spelling, information that should
> appear only in one or other presentation, and so on.
> • What the role of profiles will be in terms of specifying what aspects of
> MNX-Common will be supported by different types of applications, and how to
> manage user and developer expectation around these differences.
> • How should layout and performance data be represented in MNX-Common, and
> how should this interact with the semantic data.
>
> Our medium-term goal is to present proposed solutions to these fundamental
> issues at our Community Group meeting at Musikmesse in April.
>
> We welcome feedback from members of the Community Group about these
> changes and our plans for 2019. We look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Daniel, Michael and Adrian
>
>