Re: F2F agenda ideas

I would like to offer to help Tzviya chair the F2F.

I hear your frustration with the SC, but I believe we still have legal reason to want to keep it going until the IDPF can officially cease to be.  Garth- can you weigh in on that?

I would love for us to see a way to move forward with the SC being a more effective driver of the work across the groups. I think it might help if we considered ourselves to be more of team and not just a bunch of chairs who have to talk every couple of weeks.

From my own recollections of the IDPF years, we started as a trade organization and quickly started work on a standard because we realized the business was struggling without one. We ebbed and flowed through the early 2000s as the business did. We were always chasing in a way because the business competitors weren’t willing to talk about standards for things that they were launching until there were a handful doing the same thing different ways. I remember a particular moment with the board where we were looking at the mission and changed the name and re-focused to be more of a standards org than a trade org because we couldn’t afford with our budget to really be both. We wanted to keep the trade stuff going for the communication side of it (so the conference) and the contact with people who could weigh in on direction. For a long time Bill kept his ear to the ground with all of us and people beyond to try to figure out what was needed from the business side and worked closely with Markus who did that coordination on the technical side. But there were several times when the board pulled Bill back to the center to focus on what the majority of the membership needed for solid wide adoption of EPUB. Readium was one of the items that came out of that.

I think it is important that we spend some time when we are together (or before) to think about where we have come from and where the industry needs us to be now. I hope that we can focus on a positive and solution oriented approach to looking at what has worked and what hasn’t. I think we have a history as a group of  bringing our frustrations to the table in a way that shuts things down before they can get discussed. I would recommend that we work on framing things without painting ourselves into corners and be honest about the amount of time and energy we each have to devote so that we can identify where maybe something doesn’t seem feasible because we don’t know where the resources might come from.  We should also before the F2F note the accomplishments we’ve had over the last three years and give ourselves some credit for that. Maybe it’s not where we imagined things might go, but we’ve collectively done a lot.

I would like to share with you that I had an amazing conversation yesterday with a colleague at Amazon about getting involved with our work at the W3C. I can tell you more tomorrow about her insight on why they want to be involved and what their concerns are that I think it will help us with a bit of framing where might go from here.

I’m looking forward to our call tomorrow and our meeting next month. I fully intend to make 2020 the beginning of a new age of digital publishing goodness.


From: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:14 PM
To: "Siegman, Tzviya" <tsiegman@wiley.com>
Cc: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>, W3C Publishing Steering Committee <public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: Re: F2F agenda ideas
Resent-From: <public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 12:14 PM

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 11:51 AM Siegman, Tzviya <tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>> wrote:

I’ve had a bit more of a chance to think through how we can come away from the F2F with specific action items, and I’ve been thinking about what the SC and the Publishing Activity with has been struggling with the most for the past few years. Here are a few thoughts.


  *   The IDPF was fundamentally a standards body. Markus did more than many people realized in leading the technical work. He had a remarkable skill of leading people to think that they had come to the conclusion that they wanted to create change on their own. When it came down to the nitty gritty work, it was done by maybe 15 people. The same 15 people (with a few changes) are still doing the work today. Matt Garrish has been the editor of the EPUB specs for years. Without Matt, EPUB would not exist as it does today.

Yes.



  *   Let’s consider what the role of IDPF board was and how that transitions into leadership in the BG and whether we need an SC. The IDPF board approved spec work but was not involved in spec writing. Some members of the board participated in the WG, but that was by choice. The board worked on fiscal issues, conference planning, and proposed new work at times. Perhaps the role of the SC/ BG leadership should focus more on building community? We have seen successful events in Fukuoka. Should we be looking at workshops? Webinars? Community building? What would conferences look like? Who will fund them? How often? How do we avoid competing with an already competitive conference industry? (ebookcraft, EDRLab’s summit, etc). Building community can also mean learning to fit in with the W3C culture. That is new for many of us.
We feel like a standards organization that's trying to be a trade organization. I think there was some of that in the IDPF days, too. Bill McCoy very much operated as an evangelist for EPUB. But it's hard to be a trade organization without a budget.

I sometimes think of how we compare to the world of web development. There are standards organizations, user agent vendors, and content providers just as in the world of ebooks. But one thing that is missing in ebooks is the idea of developer relations. I think a fair amount of the work of identifying business needs and bringing them to the standards organizations and browser vendors is done by DevRel people. We don't really have that in our world.



  *   The SC is not functioning as a committee. We are several people who often have conflicting goals with no leader to provide vision or help us to come to agreement about the goals. Thus, the Publishing Activity has no clear goals and no clear direction. Should we appoint a chair? Should we close the SC? The SC and BG often overlap significantly. Let’s consider why and how to manage this.
I am often frustrated by discussing a particular issue in a SC call, and then discussing the same issue in a BG call, and then discussing the same issue in a different BG call. At times 90% of the attendees of a BG call are SC members.


  *   If we don’t make EPUB a REC (at some point), then why are we in the W3C?
 This is an excellent question, worthy of much thought. I suppose I should write up my thoughts sooner rather than later...

Dave