Combining the EPUB 3 Community Group and the Publishing Community Group

I write to describe some (mostly administrative) changes that are 
planned on the near term for the EPUB 3 and Publishing CGs.

The short version is that these changes will only impact a few of you 
who have joined the current Publishing CG and not joined the EPUB 3 CG. 
Those few of you will need to re-join the Publishing CG after we make 
the changes.  We will send you individual emails when that occurs.

Huge thanks to all of the CG chairs; Dave Cramer, Rachel Comerford, Jeff 
Xu, and Mateus Teixeira.  Some are planning to continue in their current 
roles of CG chair and some are expecting to become the chairs of the 
proposed EPUB 3 Working Group.

The longer version:

With the recently announced plan [1] to propose to charter an EPUB 3 
Working Group to advance the EPUB3 Community Group Specification to a 
W3C Recommendation the role of the EPUB 3 CG changes from spec 
maintenance to review of the planned Working Group's work, community 
support, furthering deployment of EPUB 3, and whatever other 
EPUB-related outreach tasks the community wishes.

At the same time the original role of the current Publishing CG becomes 
even more vital; to be the incubator community for Publishing@W3C as 
described in that CG's home repository [2].  Incubations can inform the 
Recommendation-track work on EPUB 3 as well as further AudioBook work 
and any other aspect of web publishing technology that the community wishes.

There is some administrative overhead in maintaining separate Community 
Groups.  And noting that the current EPUB 3 CG has precedent for "task 
forces" [3], we plan to combine the EPUB3 CG and the Publishing CG, 
keeping the name "Publishing Community Group" for the combination and 
referring to the existing EPUB 3 community as a task force within the 
Publishing CG.

We intend to retain the two mailing lists and the two GitHub 
repositories; they will all be "owned by" the Publishing CG.

As the membership of the current EPUB 3 CG is much larger than that of 
the current Publishing CG, our plan is to simply rename the current EPUB 
3 CG.  Those who have joined the EPUB3 CG should not have to take any 
action; you will only see the formal name of the CG change.  Those small 
number of you who have joined only the current Publishing CG will have 
to re-join the (renamed) Publishing CG.  We will let you know 
individually when that becomes necessary.

We thank you for your continued interest and participation in the 
activities of Publishing@W3C.

Ralph Swick, W3C Architecture and Technology Lead, and
Ivan Herman, W3C Publishing Technical Specialist

[1] 
https://www.w3.org/blog/2020/03/listen-to-the-people-the-future-of-epub-and-new-directions-for-publishing-w3c/
[2] https://github.com/w3c/publishingcg/
[3] https://github.com/w3c/publ-cg/wiki#sign-up-for-task-forces

Received on Monday, 23 March 2020 15:53:30 UTC