RE: have we quantified the EPUBCheck "ask"?

And, based on a few further conversations today I’d like to add one more aspect: where to put the funds. 

 

I have inquired further internally at W3C and our preference is to identify another organization to receive and spend the funds, ideally one that is experienced in management of open source projects. W3C is happy to promote the activity and its sponsors, to have some high-level guidance of the activity come under auspices of Publishing@W3C, and to plan to host an official instance of EPUBCheck a la the current validator.idpf.org and the HTML5 validator at validator.w3.org (which was the original inspiration for the IDPF hosted instance). But we think that since the evolution of EPUBCheck will need to be driven by needs of the stakeholders, it should be done in a context where this can be prioritized in a streamlined manner, independently of the evolution of EPUB 3.x and future specifications which will be developed at W3C. And the overhead for handling earmarked donations in relatively small amounts would be challenging at W3C.

 

And, FYI I will be leaving the Readium Foundation Board of Directors at the end of the month. So I can now advocate a bit more directly that doing this work as a Readium project would be a logical option (previously I was a bit shy about suggesting this since I had been in effect wearing multiple hats). It’s certainly not the only option but I think it makes sense and Readium Foundation has a track record of accepting and managing earmarked donations for a particular purpose, and is very lean.

 

Of course if no such organization can be found to take the money and manage the open source work, we could revisit W3C doing so. I’m not saying it’s not a possibility just that (W3C management thinks that think another entity like Readium Foundation would be better suited to do it.

 

--Bill

 

From: Bill McCoy <bmccoy@w3.org> 
Sent: Monday, April 9, 2018 12:18 PM
To: 'W3C Publishing Steering Committee' <public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Cc: 'Karen L Myers' <karen@w3.org>
Subject: have we quantified the EPUBCheck "ask"?

 

Hi Folks,

 

Apologies, I was out all last week with limited access. Thanks for progressing inc. setting an agenda for tomorrow’s call.

 

Apologies as well if I’ve missed it, but have we laid out a concrete (even if rough) “ask” for our hat-passing of financial support of EPUBCheck? Karen Myers has an interested party (major aggregator/distributor of ebooks) and for her to follow up most effectively I think she should be armed with a number (or I guess two numbers – ideal amount for initial contribution + soft commitment to ongoing annual support at a lesser number).

 

For example I thought we were thinking in terms of asking around $10K (for top level aggregator) plus soft commitment to providing $2K per year ongoing maintenance. But I’m not sure that I got these numbers at all right, and as well as an “ask” maybe we could aim a bit higher, for example asking $20K each from the largest stakeholders? (anyway if we ask $20K we might get $10K, if we ask $10K we might get $5K). Then for the smallest folks we think it worth asking for help, maybe we ask $5K and hope to get $2K now, with not necessarily any even soft commitments as to future maintenance?

 

As far as the quid pro quo’s for contribution I hadn’t heard that either but we have discussed:

 

* All funds would be earmarked only for EPUBCheck development
* Funders would be acknowledged on the EPUBCheck github repo as well as on any W3C-hosted official deployment of EPUBCheck (successor to validator.idpf.org)
* Funders (who contribute a minimum of $10K)would get to participate in a task force for steering development priorities 

 

Again if this is already figured out, apologies for missing it. If not I would encourage us to get crisp even if it’s only a best guess. Then we go try to round up some funders (and if we get a couple very quickly, that will help us get more).


Thanks,

 

--Bill