Re: late incoming: Publishing@W3C Summit Theme

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 1:39 PM, Bill McCoy <bmccoy@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi, I like the direction of  Dave’s rewriting but a few fine points;
>
>
>
IDPF only held one DigiCon event and this was our least-well-attended
> within at least the last 5 years (maybe ever) due to BEA being in Chicago.
> At the same time I don’t think we want to go with the older “Digital Book”
> event brand since the reason IDPF moved away from a book-centric name is
> even more valid now. I could suggest maybe we consider changing to “IDPF
> events and the EPUB community” or something that would highlight “IDPF”
> (clearly the primary conference brand as perceived by most attendees and
> sponsors, not Digital Book or DigiCon) and also help address my second point
>

Seems potentially confusing to brand using the name of an organization that
no longer exists.


> While I definitely like the higher-level approach, having zero mention of
> EPUB at all bothers me a bit both in terms of potential negative PR about
> W3C’s respect for EPUB from the historical IDPF community (attendees and
> sponsors) and from a practical perspective (if the event seems theoretical
> we may not get the folks to come who would be eager to come to, for
> example, an EPUB Summit event).
>

It would be easy enough to add the word "EPUB" to the proposed abstract,
given four of my five session proposals used the word "EPUB."

What does practical mean in this context? Are people clamoring for a
conference with talks like "5 simple tips to supercharge your metadata" and
"The 5 CSS hacks that Amazon hates"? The motto of the Balisage conference
is "There is nothing so practical as a good theory," and perhaps we need
some good theories to help guide us in this time of change and uncertainty.

I'll save my response to "negative PR about W3C's respect for EPUB" for an
entirely separate rant :)

Re: audience we want to attract (per Tviyza’s email just in), I think there
> are multiple axes (business vs. technical, EPUB community vs. broader
> community of publishing vs. Web folks), level (C-level vs. mid-level vs.
> hands-on folks).  I understood we were in agreement that we were NOT
> targeting C-level (as it would be fruitless to try to get publishing CEOs
> to SF for a W3C conference in November), that we WERE targeting the
> mid-level folks with some bleed-over to hands-on folks so thus necessarily
> a mix of business and technical. And that we were going to try for both
> EPUB community and beyond – that being perhaps the trickiest one to
> balance. If this is not the consensus I think we need to adjust our
> thinking quickly and  the theme statement should only be the tail on that
> dog.
>

We talk about "technical" a lot without being clear about what we mean. Is
talking about Kindle in Motion technical? Is talking about web payments
technical or business? I don't think anyone is proposing code-heavy
discussions, or getting into the details of how publisher rendering
instructions might be transmitted to a reading system. But I don't want to
underestimate our potential audiences, or keep the discourse so basic that
it doesn't actually help anyone. Nearly everyone I talk to, including
absolutely non-technical people, tell me they're bored at DBW or IDPF/BEA.
We've all heard Richard Nash being pleased with himself. There's no
shortage of inspiring talks by self-published authors, or broad
generalizations about sales trends based on incomplete data sets.

There is a shortage of deep, public discussions of the challenges we face.
What lessons have we learned from the slow and incomplete adoption of
EPUB3? How do we keep up with proprietary implementations? How do we
encourage interoperability among reading systems? How do we address the
tragedy of the commons around standards work in general?


>
>
> And, there are multiple objectives to consider – building community and
> engagement, sharing information and advancing the industry, promoting
> Publishing@W3C, maximizing # of attendees, maximizing net attendee
> revenue (highest per-attendee yield with lowest variable costs), maximizing
> sponsorship revenue. I’m confident that holding an amazingly great event
> will be a great way to do well on all these objectives but some may be
> better than others. For example TPAC is an amazing event but historically
> it’s not interesting to sponsors and not a net revenue generator overall.
> The Publishing@W3C Summit needs to produce $25K surplus or else there
> will likely not be another one and the budget for Publishing@W3C is also
> in danger. So from my point of view the event must be construed and
> marketed to meet these objectives as well as being an amazingly great event.
>

I think we face a huge challenge here. TPAC would likely cease to be an
amazing event if it was interesting to sponsors and a net revenue
generator. If we create an amazingly great event, we have a good chance of
attracting people. But if we try to create something that's interesting to
sponsors and a net revenue generator, it's hard to imagine that being an
amazingly great event.

Regards,

Dave