Re: Efforts towards creating a Working Group

Hi all!

Thank you Antonin for moving this forward, and also many thanks to 
Gregory, Osma and Vladimir for your responses!

For us at hbz (and I'd say in the library field in general), 
standardization is super valuable, since it makes clear that solutions 
are not tied to specific vendors or other service providers (like 
ourselves), so I'm very excited that we are aiming to make this a Web 
standard!

For our organization I can say that myself and Adrian are looking 
forward to being part of the WG, maybe in some shifted roles. 
Requirements for WG chairs seem to be stricter, so maybe with Adrian 
(who is our W3C representative) as chair, and myself as Team contact? 
We'll have to dig deeper into the W3C process details to see what's 
required and what makes sense.

On the implementation topic, we're already trying to keep our service 
[1] up to date with the spec, and will focus effort on that where it's 
crucial. We're also planning to build a client that's integrated into a 
data processing toolkit that we maintain [2], which we'll also implement 
based on the latest spec, and keep up to date.

Cheers,
Fabian

[1] https://lobid.org/gnd/reconcile/
[2] https://github.com/metafacture/

On 6/21/22 13:47, Antonin Delpeuch wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I wanted to make it visible that we have a project of migrating from our
> current Community Group (CG) to a W3C Working Group (WG). This is a more
> officially W3C-endorsed structure which has the powers to publish
> recommendations (i.e. sorts of standards). This would give more
> visibility to the protocol, and probably foster its adoption on the long
> run.
> 
> Creating a Working Group is a bit more involved than a Community Group.
> The summary of what we need for this can be found as "todo" items in our
> draft charter for the WG:
> https://reconciliation-api.github.io/charter/working_group_charter.html
> 
> In particular, I draw your attention to the following points:
> 
> - we need some concrete time commitment from one or a few organizers for
> the working group (which might require coordination with our respective
> organizations - or even funding applications?). Typically, looking at
> other working groups, there is a lead committing to some percentage of a
> Full-Time Equivalent (sometimes as little as 0.01 FTE) and other members
> committing to be active in discussions. Who would be motivated to play a
> role in this?
> 
> - unlike a CG which can run indefinitely, a WG has a fixed term during
> which it should produce its outcomes. We are also asked to come up with
> a timeline of our deliverables and other milestones. Therefore, once he
> WG starts we need to be relatively quick to publish our specs
> officially. On my side, I am wondering at which stage of maturity for
> the specs we want to be at, when migrating to a WG. In particular, I
> opened a discussion some weeks ago about changing the API to make it
> more compatible with REST principles: if we go ahead with this proposal,
> I suspect it would be useful to have already written up (and ideally
> adopted, in a few systems) such new specs before migrating to a WG. What
> do you think?
> 
> - to move our specs to a "Proposed Recommendation", we need to
> demonstrate a few implementations of it, so it could be useful to have
> an idea of who could commit to implementing the latest specs on their
> side (as a reconciliation service or client) as part of this effort.
> 
> Also, because we have many organizations represented in this group, I
> wonder if this migration to a WG would be a good opportunity to apply
> for some network funding for this. I have the feeling that we could be
> quite convincing (with our activity as a CG so far, our many different
> implementations), and it should be doable to work as a group since we
> have relatively clear separations of responsibilities from the start
> (each organization implements the API in its own context).
> 
> I am very interested to read what you think of all this!
> 
> Antonin
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 23 June 2022 12:28:35 UTC