RE: F2F agenda ideas

Hello all,

 

I’ll be taking off for Hawaii at the same time as the meeting starts. If it is on Zoom, perhaps it can be recorded and send me the link of the recording after.

 

Some of my thoughts.

 

As some may recall, NIST started the development and called the meetings, and once we got to a 1.0 they declared victory and got out of it.

 

It is at that time that the OEBF formed, and later became the IDPF.

 

It certainly was a trade organization to serve the publishing industry. IMO this is a limiting factor that should be addressed at some point. In the survey, I put in a few sections relating to Education and corporate and governmental publishing, and that is just a start. Everybody needs to be able to use publishing Standards. This is where PDF shines in that anybody can produce a PDF. However, both Web Publications and packaged content for offline use is needed. We have a lot going for us in EPUB 3, and we should capitalize on that excellent work.  there are things that are in EPUB 3 that should be fixed, and our survey hopefully will tease out some of these things.

 

The W3C is broader than companies that make money through publishing, and I believe we should water our roots with those players, and broaden our reach to encompass all areas of online and offline publishing. If we can take some of the mystery out of EPUB, I think it will help adoption. DAISY has a WordToEPUB tool available today, and we will be promoting that more broadly in the next few months. This will help to bring publishing to the common person. Recall that the birth of the WYSIWYG word processors  predated PDF, and having a faithful printing of what was in the WYSIWYG editor is what people wanted. Today, people want to publish to the web and to EPUB 3 (they don’t know it yet) and also generate that file for printing.

 

Accessibility has been a major victory, and it is wonderful to see this. We need to keep that momentum going with online publishing and offline packaged content. The legal demand for accessible published documents is real, and doing this by retrofitting PDF is a real mess. We can clean up that mess.

 

One of the reasons for promoting Readium was the problem of IDPF’s approach which published a specification (standard) and then waited for implementation. Here too, the W3C’s newer model of having a Recommendation having two implementations is a better approach. I guess this issue will be addressed in the To-Rec-or-not-to-Rec discussion. For me, it Shure would be great to have two EPUB Readers I could take to the bank for reading. Right now with HTML I have Chrome and Firefox that fills this role. Thorium is getting close. Here too, if Online and offline publishing was integrated into the fabric of society, then there would be default Reading Systems on all platforms. I would love to see high school teachers have their students producing fully accessible documents, which would make accessibility less of a mystery.

 

I’m rambling, sigh. 

 

I am totally on board with the notion of having this decade become the roaring 20’s for Born Accessible publishing.

 

Best

George

 

 

 

 

From: Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> 
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2020 12:31 PM
To: McCloy-Kelley, Liisa <lmccloy-kelley@penguinrandomhouse.com>; Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>; 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

 

Some miscellaneous thoughts inline commenting on Tzviya's piece, Dave's, and Liisa's.

On 1/9/2020 1:47 PM, McCloy-Kelley, Liisa wrote:

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'm not sure what this reason is, but there is a difference between having the SC focused on a single legal reason and its current role to do broad coordination.  If we are keeping it around exclusively for the former reason, then we should limit its authority to that topic.

 

 

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. 

This is a possible path.  This would require a leader for the SC and a well defined agenda.  In particular, it would be helpful to be crisp - what is done by the SC and what is done by the BG.  Today, those are muddled together.

 

 

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. 

+1 to all aspects of the above paragraph.

In terms of "a positive and solution oriented approach", it would be useful to identify specific tangible things we can do going forward - in this email thread - so we can discuss it prior to the F2F - and reach conclusions in the F2F.

 

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. 

Indeed a program on enhancing Amazon interop could be an important direction going forward.  That shouldn't be our primary focus, but it is a good leg of a multi-legged strategy.



 

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.

Wow!  +1.



 

 

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

 

If the IDPF folks are still around to create a conference, we should make that an explicit discussion point: do we want such a conference?  should it be annual?  what would it look like?

Some interesting topics for a next conference include: audiobooks, accessiblity, Amazon, publishing and web, packaging, tooling. 

*  

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. 

Methodologically, I think we should not shoot down ideas before we develop them (i.e. we want to be a trade org but can't without a budget).  Instead we should first figure out what we want to achieve.  Once we have that, we can figure out how to achieve (or whether it is possible).

Continuing with the idea that we are trying to be a trade organization, it would be useful to create a list of what "trade organization type activities" we want to get done in the next 1-3 years.  If we write them down then we can ask whether they are achievable or what funding is required.  An example is the question above that Tzviya indicated - whether we want to have conferences/webinars.

Fwiw, I always thought that it would be the BG that picked up the traditional "IDPF playing a trade organization role" with the transition into W3C.

 

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. 

I agree that this needs to be rationalized.  We should consider all options except the current situation.  Some options are:

1. Drop the SC.

2. Drop the SC except for some legal reason.

3. Empower the SC with a chair and a well defined agenda that is different from the BG.

 

* 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...

I believe that for a standard as important at EPUB, it is not acceptable that the flagship spec is not approved through a formal standardization process.  In my mind, EPUB unquestionably needs to be on the REC track.  The question is: what version of EPUB and when.

My hope is that this question gets informed by the survey.  Here are some examples:

1.  From the survey, an interesting roadmap arises for a new rev of EPUB in the next 3-5 years. 

In this case I would drive to move EPUB 3.5 to the REC track.  The rationale would be since we have a major new rev; it ought to be on the REC track.

2. From the survey, we discover that there is not much to do for EPUB in the next 3-5 years.

In this case I would drive to move EPUB 3.2 to the REC track.  The rationale is that it is inconceivable that the flagship EPUB standard (i.e. 3.2) should last for a decade without going through formal standardization. 

 

 

Dave