RE: late incoming: Publishing@W3C Summit Theme

I am not going to respond inline, because after too much nesting it gets difficult to read.

I am sensing a tension between a desire for conference that attracts a “technical” versus “business” audience. In my experience these audiences are not as different as we imagine them to be. I chuckled at the example that Bill gave (OAUTH), because I have discussed that very spec with a colleague who is responsible for business development for a technical platform. We discuss various technical solutions, so that we can choose a good direction. We do not go into great detail, but we do not pretend that technology is for a select group. We no longer live in that world.

Bill, you refer to successful conferences of the past. I will focus on TOC because that hasn’t happened in years, and people still talk about those conferences with reverence and excitement. What did those conferences have?

-          Vetted speakers: Every speaker was either invited by Joe and Kat or submitted a video demonstrating that they were capable of captivating the audience with a great topic. There was also a great commitment to variety and diversity.

-          Plenty of advance notice, marketing, and buzz: Every TOC ended with marketing for the next TOC. Social media was key to marketing as well.

-          Fun! We need to make sure that the conference sounds fun, and maybe offer something like the Valentine’s day hearts with TOC messages (or ebookcraft cookies) that everyone remembers. The copy in the original proposal sounds like just another conference about topics we have all revisited for the last 8 years (sorry, Bill). Dave’s text sounded passionate and fun. We might not be used to planning fun, but it is what makes people get on a plane.

Between all our groups, we have a few successful conference planners. Laura Brady does a stellar job with ebookcraft. Laurent Le Meur does a great job with the Epub Summit. Why not tap them?

(And, yes, I am offering to help plan.)

Tzviya

Tzviya Siegman
Information Standards Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>

From: Bill McCoy [mailto:bmccoy@w3.org]
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2017 12:47 PM
To: 'Dave Cramer'
Cc: 'Karen Myers'; 'AUDRAIN LUC'; 'McCloy-Kelley, Liisa'; 'Paul Belfanti'; 'Bill Kasdorf'; 'PBG Steering Committee (Public)'
Subject: RE: late incoming: Publishing@W3C Summit Theme



From: Dave Cramer [mailto:dauwhe@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2017 9:29 AM
To: Bill McCoy <bmccoy@w3.org<mailto:bmccoy@w3.org>>
Cc: Karen Myers <karen@w3.org<mailto:karen@w3.org>>; AUDRAIN LUC <LAUDRAIN@hachette-livre.fr<mailto:LAUDRAIN@hachette-livre.fr>>; McCloy-Kelley, Liisa <lmccloy-kelley@penguinrandomhouse.com<mailto:lmccloy-kelley@penguinrandomhouse.com>>; Paul Belfanti <Paul.Belfanti@ascendlearning.com<mailto:Paul.Belfanti@ascendlearning.com>>; Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com<mailto:bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>>; PBG Steering Committee (Public) <public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: late incoming: Publishing@W3C Summit Theme

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

Right, but we are in a transition esp. with historical attendees and sponsors who know that we’ve done an “IDPF” event in the past. But certainly I don’t’ suggest we brand with IDPF just that we find a way to connect the dots for former attendees/sponsors who care that this event will in some respects carry forward that tradition/community. This could however be in targeted outreach (we have attendee contact info) so could remove from the more general theme statement.

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.

OK maybe I mis-used the word “practical” 😉. And I was responding to the theme description not your list of session proposals.

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.

Probably I conflate “technical” and “detail-level” a bit.

Is talking about Kindle in Motion technical?

Talking about KiM in terms of the functionality it provides is not technical but might be detail-level depending on, well, how detailed it gets. Talking about how to implement similar capabilities using CSS features or JS and the matrix of browser support and polyfillability for such capabilities is technical and detail-level.

Is talking about web payments technical or business?

Illustrating  how mobile payments has radically transformed consumer behavior in China and implications of open standards vs. proprietary systems (why we need “web payments” not just “WeChat Pay”) is business. Talking about OAUTH etc. is technical.

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.

Agreed.

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.

Agreed!!!!

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?

I agree although IMO we don’t want a US/trade-book-centric dialog. Adoption of EPUB 3 in Japan was rapid and is essentially complete. Adoption of EPUB 3 in corporate publishing is OTOH nearly non-existent. Slow and incomplete applies mainly to US and to some degree Europe. We can look at lessons learned from the US-market situation but I’m not sure that deep ending on what Adobe or Amazon did or didn’t do at the right or wrong times is really going to be that relevant for a corporate publisher who is still looking at how to get past print-replica PDF, or for a Japanese manga publisher already happily using EPUB 3 FXL and excited that now they can finally send it to B&N too.


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.

$25K surplus is a modest target IMO (IDPF conference generated up to 6X that amount not including Reed’s cut which W3C doesn’t have to pay). I want to skew towards an amazingly great event as much if not more than anyone. But, TANSTAAFL (especially when the L is at a Hyatt Regency!!).

Regards,

Dave