- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 10:40:58 +0000
- To: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: public-owl-wg@w3.org
On Nov 9, 2007, at 9:58 AM, Jeremy Carroll wrote: > Bijan > > I would find it helpful, if you would clarify whether you were > speaking > - as Univ of Manchester rep > - on behalf of Clark & Parsia LLC > - or merely as yourself > > during the discussion of goals/styles/audiences. Myself. I had not then had a chance to consult with anyone else from either organization about specifics...I was trying to give background on why someone, and I also decided to concretize it by putting myself in the hotseat...might have legitimate member organization driven interests against the production of arbitrary quantities of outreach materials as *working group deliverables*. I favor, for a *number* of reasons, a fairly restrained approach to meeting our charter obligations wrt outreach material. I cannot say, in advance, that I would support or oppose any specific proposal...I presume this is true for *everyone* on *all* WG decisions. I'll point out that I have been made more inclined to make my *potential* opposition manifest as early and as often as possible due, in part, to expectation setting posts like: http://www.w3.org/mid/47308D7F.2010405@hpl.hp.com """Precisely which documents come out of the working group process is emergent, lots of people have an effective veto, but hardly anyone uses it. ... I think legitimate reasons for these are few and far between.""" Now your list of plausible reasons include several that I'd voice as possibilities, but this sort of language seems chilling. But, apparently, trying to be clear about my concerns is also deemed so outre that...well...people's flabbers were gasted. So, I guess I'll wait until there are documents or text on the table to raise any specific concerns. I think that outreach material is very important. It does compete with things that I (and others!) do professionally, e.g., write articles, books, tutorials, perform training sessions, etc. It also requires a lot of WG effort including extensive user *AND* technical review. Technically inaccuracies in outreach material, unless very deliberately introduced in a pedagogically sound way, can render the outreach material actively harmful. (This is distinct from us producing all sorts of material "in house" primarily for in house consumption, since we have a much tighter feedback loop, ancillary channels (e.g., telecons), and WG participants have a high level of commitment.) Obviously the standards are much higher for a Rec track document (or part thereof), than a WG note, and much higher for a WG note than for a Wiki page. I do encourage people to put forth proposals, but only if they recognize that such effort does not entail acceptance. As an example, I put quite a bit of work into my annotation system proposal, and I have no expectation that it will necessarily be incorporated into our design, or if it is incorporated, that any of my text necessarily will used. Cheers, Bijan. P.S. Feel free to contact me off list or on the phone if you want to chat with me about these issues, or even just to denounce me. Although, denunciators, you may consider me adequately denunciated :) I don't tend to reply to followups on list. If off list discussion reaches a reasonable point of harmony or summary, I'm sure those interlocutors will be happy to summarize back to the group.
Received on Friday, 9 November 2007 10:45:33 UTC