Practicalities for the Working Group...

Dear all,

While Manu is busy sorting out the telco times, I tried to collect a
number practical information on running the Working Group. This is
primarily aimed at participants who have not been in W3C Working Groups
before, but a number of practical pointers are, hopefully, useful for
old timers, too...

-  The work of the group happens primarily via email. There are,
actually, several mailing lists that have been set up with slightly
different access policies.

  - public-rdfa-wg@w3.org with archives at [1]. All members of the WG
are automatically added to that mailing list which will be _the_ mailing
list to use for our work. The archives[1] are publicly visible, and
others can also subscribe to the list. If you want to remember a single
mail address only, this is it:-)

  - member-rdfa-wg@w3.org with archives at [2]. The difference between
the previous one and this one is that the archives are visible to W3C
members only. All of you are automatically added to this list, too. I do
not expect this mailing list to be used a lot. However, there might be
issues that W3C members do _not_ want to discuss in public (eg, some
implementation details, patent policy issues) and this is the list for them.

  - there was a general, public email list for RDFa, namely
public-rdfa@w3.org (archived at [3]). This would just stay around and we
should all monitor that list. We may use this list asking for formal
comments on our documents later, too (but we can decide that later).

- The official home page of the WG has been set up[4]. More importantly,
though, there is also a separate Media Wiki instance set up for the
group[5]. The pages are publicly visible; to edit the pages you should
login and use your W3C account. Only official members of the Working
Group can log in. I would expect this wiki to be used as one of the main
working vehicle to jot down ideas, try out specifications portions, give
examples, etc.

- The phone bridge for the telcos is the so called "zakim bridge". There
are phone numbers in the US (Boston area), the UK, and France:
+1.617.761.6200, +44.117.370.6152, and +33.4.89.06.34.99, respectively.
You will have to type in the code 7332 which stands for, surprisingly, RDFA.

- Telcos make a heavy use of an IRC channel. The IRC server is
irc.w3.org:6665, the channel name is #rdfa. Minute taking, discussions
during meetings, etc, all make a use of IRC, so you are all advised to
join on irc, too. In case you have not used IRC before, [6] might give
you some guidance.

- We run several 'bots' on the IRC channel to help the work. Here are
some to remember, including some additional descriptions

   - Zakim[7], helps queue management, shows the participants, can
mute/unmute people, etc

   - RRSagent[8], provides automatic archiving of meeting minutes, plus
some commands that help minute taking and nice minute generation

   - RRSagent is actually bound to a 'commonscribe' tool[9] that will,
eventually, generate more professionally looking minutes on our site. To
see what I mean, look at an example minute of the SPARQL Working Group[10]

   - trackbot[11] bound to our tracker[12] that helps keeping track of
issues and actions.

- The group will have to decide who will be editors of our
recommendations and what methodology we will use to produce them.
However, most probably contributors will have to use CVS. Indeed, you
can regard the W3C Web site as one giant CVS repository. This means that
you will have to use (possibly install) CVS on your system, and set up a
CVS account on W3C. See [3] for more details. (Note that this is not the
only approach taken by groups, albeit the most widespread ones. The OWL
working group, for example, did all the document editing on the Wiki and
some extra tools were around to make the final publications starting by
the wiki pages. However, many people do not like editing with the wiki
syntax... but that is something to be discussed and decided by the group.)

I know this is quite a lot to remember and looks a bit scary at first,
but it is not that bad. These tools work reasonably well together and,
most of the time, you will have to remember only a fraction of what the
tools are able to do...

Ivan


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa-wg/
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/member-rdfa-wg/
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/
[5] http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/wiki/
[6] http://www.w3.org/Project/IRC/
[7] http://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot
[8] http://www.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent
[9] http://www.w3.org/2009/CommonScribe/manual
[10] http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/meeting/2010-01-12
[11] http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/irc
[12] http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/
[13] http://www.w3.org/Project/CVSdoc/

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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