Re: W3C Solid Community Call

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 07:12:32PM +0100, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 at 18:43, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 at 18:23, Mitzi László <mitzil@inrupt.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi W3C Solid Community Group,
> >>
> >> You can find the final agenda [1] and dial in details [2] for the call
> >> tomorrow at 1400 CET.
> >>
> >
> > "proposal to move specs to github/w3c-solid"
> >
> > This proposal is problematic, in a general sense.
> >
> > When I spoke to Tim about starting this group, we did it because we didnt
> > have a place (ie mailing list) for threaded conversations, of a technical
> > nature.
> >
> > There is an expanse of the remit here, which im not opposed to, ie to help
> > incubate all the solid specs.  I think it's actually a good idea, it is
> > however, a different idea from what I put down when I started the group.
> >
> > But in practice, a mandate needs to come explicitly from Tim, even better
> > if he were to join the group (so that he can read mailing list discussion),
> > and cannot be via proxy.
> >
> > Tim needs to say what he wants to be put under the aegis of the CG, at
> > least initially.
> >
> > Overall what we require from the specs is a period of stability.  If this
> > group can help to ensure that, I think that's going to be a plus for solid.
> >
> 
> My constructive suggest is as follows :
> 
> From my experience, It normally takes a W3C, or any other group actually, 6
> months to find its feet.  You will get initial interest, and then depending
> on the cadence of the calls, people will start to drop off and you will be
> left with a few people that attend calls regularly
> 
> In parallel to this groups tend to find a governance system which is
> basically unanimous common sense decisions are taken most of the time.
> 
> What I would suggest is that this group for 6 months, or even better until
> end of the year, incubate proposals, but with a lock on not removing
> anything that may be in use.
> 
> By this time we may have a relatively stable server and a bunch of apps.  I
> think the bulk of the work in the group will be oriented towards new
> proposals, new shapes, design patterns and things like naming consensus.
> The better proposals then get promoted further.

I totally agree about the start-up cost of W3C groups, and I would
strongly caution against starting one. When you do, you end up making
a contract with the W3C members that you're going to start with X and
produce Y in Z time. It's much more efficient to start a working group
once you've already got a solid design, tests and multiple
implementations that pass those tests.

Given the number of repos in github.com/solid, I do think it could be
helpful to separate the specs from the implementations. Right now,
they're sort of awash in a sea of repositories (75) and we want to
make it as easy as possible for folks to find the repos to submit
issues and PRs.

We wouldn't have to move them to github.com/w3c but it kind of makes
sense; folks are already used to looking there for W3C Community Group
products and it wouldn't require any interaction with W3C so those
group start-up costs go to 0. The cost to us is:

1 that someone has to click a couple buttons on github

2 we have to change the upsteam repo wherever we have it checked out.

3 we should update links to anything we move.


> >> Mitzi
> >>
> >> [1] https://www.w3.org/community/solid/wiki/Meetings
> >>
> >> [2]  https://zoom.us/j/121552099
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>

-- 
-eric

office: +1.617.258.5741 32-G528, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02144 USA
mobile: +1.617.599.3509

(eric@w3.org)
Feel free to forward this message to any list for any purpose other than
email address distribution.

Received on Thursday, 28 March 2019 09:58:16 UTC