Re: Meeting times, structure, and alignment

Rick-

One of the things that was discussed at TPAC (and is something the TAG does) was a rotating schedule of calls so that there are 3 timeblocks and it is at least decent for folks 2 out of 3 meetings. Luc and I talked about perhaps getting to something like that and less frequent and more organized calIs for the BG in the beginning of 2019. But in the meantime, there is a lot to do to figure out how we move forward and what the business needs, so keeping to at least bi-weekly for now made sense.

To spell out what you are proposing and what it means for us (so that not everyone has to do the lookup I just did):
1300GMT            London 1pm
                                Paris 2pm
                                New York  8am
                                San Francisco 5am
                                Tokyo 10pm

2100GMT             London 9pm
                                Paris 10pm
                                New York  4pm
                                San Francisco 1pm
                                Tokyo 6am (next day)

What do folks think?

I think we haven’t really been using the Friday calls for agendas for the Tuesday calls for a long time. Sometimes we raise things there to talk about in advance, but we mostly have used those calls to keep things going with the EPUBcheck efforts over the last several months. Which has been quite successful thanks to the many efforts of mainly Tzviya, Rachel, Luc and George. Thank you to them.

I am fine to change the purpose and name of that committee to something more related to coordination of the groups. I think we could do a better job of that generally. As I have mentioned in that call, it is hard to be a member of one of the groups and not all and still have a coherent picture of what is happening across. For us to give good value to membership at both the full and BG levels, we need to find a way to improve how we do that.

Should it be the publishing-chairs group? We had specifically made the steering committee the chairs and the task force leaders, so maybe publishing-chairs-tf? I do think it is helpful to have both.

Are we ready to let go of the idea of the steering committee?

Personally, I still feel a responsibility to helping our broader publishing community feel like they can be a part of this work and have some say in the standards that guide what they are putting into the market without having to be engineers or having a ton of time to parse through rules and emails arguments about minutiae and semantics. I am hoping we can do that with the BG more as we move forward and with better coordination reporting back on the work and raising issues and questions at levels they can understand.

Liisa


From: "Johnson, Rick" <Rick.Johnson@vitalsource.com>
Date: Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 6:15 AM
To: W3C Publishing Steering Committee <public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: Meeting times, structure, and alignment
Resent-From: <public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 6:15 AM

Three things I’d like to discuss within this group:

  1.  Given the recent conversations about meeting times, and the recommendation about looking at the ISO best practice on teleconferencing (… there are only two windows where the timing of a two-hours conference is bearable: 13GMT and 21GMT. This can be characterized as “where is the night”, and the most frequent solution is “over the Pacific ocean” (which corresponds to 13GMT)), is it time to consider moving all of the publishing@w3c meetings (WG, BG, and CG) to these time slots?
  2.  Given the current nature of the steering committee (coordination), I would like to suggest that we stop using the Friday calls (before the bi-weekly BG call) to plan the BG meeting with this group.  The co-chairs should arrange a call for that purpose, and we should use the Friday call exclusively for coordinating activities between the three groups (taking into account my third point below).
  3.  In anticipation of a re-chartering activity for the WG, and a desire to remove any potential points of conflict that will only be distracting as we go out to the AC (and the already voiced concerns from some of the AC), the nature of this ‘steering committee’ should be aligned with W3C practices.  Essentially, I’m suggesting that we eliminate all references to a ‘steering committee’, officially disband it, and replace it with a coordination committee that represents the three groups (WG, BG, CG) and any other key areas.


-Rick