Re: F2F agenda ideas

Your rambling is always worth reading, George! Keep it comin'!--Bill

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 5:10 PM <kerscher@montana.com> wrote:

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

-- 
*Bill Kasdorf*
*Principal, Kasdorf & Associates, LLC*

*Founding Partner, Publishing Technology Partners
<https://pubtechpartners.com/>*
kasdorf.bill@gmail.com
+1 734-904-6252

ISNI: http://isni.org/isni/0000000116490786
ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786
<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786?lang=en>