Re: tasks at hand

David, 
I am interested in your idea about the NSF Grant to fund some paid work.In the past, I have submitted grant request using the ?Morrison / Russell? grant writing technique, but was unsuccessful because of expertise.The grant manager wanted an individual with a Ph.D to lead the project.We will not have that problem with W3C IG.
What are your thoughts on the categories of grants?I am not sure what departments / categories of NSF to look for available funding? 
I think NSF grant path should be investigated and I am interested in looking into that area with you, but I not sure how to position the NSF request at this time.
I welcome any comments on this topic.

-----Original Message-----
From: Manuel Strehl [mailto:svg@manuel-strehl.de]
Sent: Wednesday, September 8, 2010 03:36 PM
To: public-svg-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: tasks at hand

Hi,

I'd like to see the SVG IG to take more the role of a "community leader" or "community bridge" to the W3C.

That is, at the moment there are several websites out there introducing people to SVG, e.g., the planet SVG, svg-wow.org, carto.net, the SVG [IW]G websites, and so on. However, there seems to be no entity that bundles the efforts to educate people about SVG and forge a living community, despite of that many folks supporting SVG since years. With bundling I mean a platform, where

1) people can meet and exchange,
1a) one can get assistance in using SVG, be it in a Q&A forum or via hiring other people

2) the various websites and projects dealing with SVG are introduced, especially tutorials like David's book, and software that uses SVG

3) the mood of the crowd can be gathered and brought back to the W3C WG in a more controlled way than just browsing Twitter.

IMHO that could be a worthwhile task for the IG. In principle, we have started something like this with planet SVG two years ago, but it follows more a top down approach, than what I imagine (in the way, that it's, apart from the low-traffic forums, less a community driven site). We could decide to revamp it accordingly or let both approaches live side by side.

Take for example the Django framework and its community. A nice example of one piece, that fits nicely in their culture is:
http://djangopeople.net

That is one part of the piece, that I think would be valuable: Finding people near you, that are interested in / do actively SVG stuff.

Another is
http://djangosnippets.com

which is different from "our" SVG Wow, since it contains stuff from literally everyone in every possible quality (I really wouldn't want to see on SVG Wow any possible silly snippet of SVG.).

Combined with a Q&A platform, a link directory and a software overview, where we should invite the respective authors to write about their program, that would come close to what I'd imagine. The IG would here take the place of a moderator, inviting authors to write or fostering the link directory.

Cheers,
Manuel

PS: An other example, that comes off the top of my head, that is a successful community forge, is of course http://stackoverflow.com .

PPS: Looking at the attendees of this year's SVG Open, it seems that there is a relatively large German/Swiss community inside the SVG world. We should consider i18n work, too, since German speaking ressources about SVG are sparse.


Am 08.09.2010 20:44, schrieb Dailey, David P.: I was hoping to brainstorm a bit before trying to prioritize since sometimes that works too. But on the subject of the book, I think we had planned to announce that I?ve sort of resumed role of editor (having hoped that someone else would step up to do it, but not finding anyone to volunteer ? still looking). We had sort of divvied up responsibilities for various chapters, and some of the people doing that work have asked me what to do. Well, I can still use lots of help with the formatting of the document and with getting the HTML cleaned up so that it validates. This is stuff I am not so good at. Doug has alluded to some folks who have shown an interest in volunteering some time to help in this way and he and I have been pursuing that option as well.
 I for one would like to see our role increase vis a vis helping to survey future directions of the spec?s evolution. Some of the browser implementers have talked about how difficult it is to maintain consistency with the past (i.e., supporting legacy content) and that accordingly, from looking backwards, the future gets a bit fuzzy. Maybe helping to chart some of the community?s interests in development would be good. 
I think we may also wish to pay attention to directions that could, in some way, be fundable. A major problem with both the Book and the Torture Tests (that I think are still vital directions we should pursue) is that they take real human time. The hope had been, in the early days, that the SVG IG would be a sort of army of volunteers with time on our hands to help enable important things to happen. We all have day jobs and that has made some of the initiatives hard to follow through on. On the other hand those areas of development that border on active scientific research might be suitable for funding from NSF or other agencies. I?m just thinking aloud, but it seems that a few well-placed grant applications with proper support from a group such as this might stand a good likelihood of getting funded, and therefore staffed, and therefore completed.
Just an idea.
Rob?s presentation on how to make SVG documents more effective together with Ruud?s ideas on how to make content more semantic are both things that I for one could benefit from, so I suspect that preparation of documents about this would be good for a broader public. The SVG WG has started an initiative to make more ?primers? associated with nascent specs and this is consistent with what I gather is a W3C objective of increasing public accessibility to the otherwise rather dry specs. That was certainly the hope and promise of SVG Planet; the impediment was time. Having a conversation like this is probably a good idea.
cheers
D
From:public-svg-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-svg-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Schiller
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2010 1:21 PM
To:public-svg-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: tasks at hand

Hello all,

I'm sorry I haven't been very active here for quite awhile - and that I couldn't attend the conference this year. Lots of you know that I started a new job and moved the family across the country.


Things are starting to settle in a bit more now, but my own bandwidth is still rather tight. For this reason, I'd like to keep the main tasks the IG take on to a minimum and do a couple things right instead of scattered into a "million directions".


Certainly things like updating the Wikipedia page are good tasks to take on, but I personally don't think that needs to be an official SVG IG activity. This is actually something that a single individual could do and simply report progress here if they feel so inclined (Wikipedia actually encourages aggressive editing after all). I really encourage this type of evangelism, but not sure if I want to help manage them all within the IG.


What do you all think? What are the most important tasks that we, as a group, can accomplish?


Last year we had decided upon two:

 * SVG Torture Tests

 * SVG WG Book


Do we, as a group, still feel these are the highest priority items?


I also think it's fair to say that our experiment with building a community at PlanetSVG was unsuccessful. I think it would be good for us to admit this and move on - does anyone have suggestions as to what should be done about that site and domain?


Jeff

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Ruud Steltenpool <svg@steltenpower.com> wrote:
1. Since SVG support in IE is around the corner, isn?t it time to
rewrite the SVG article on Wikipedia to include interactivity, script,
animation, etc.? Wikipedia has a huge repository of SVG imagery already
and it might make sense to use that forum to showcase some of the cooler
features of this language that will soon become a lingua franca for
people speaking vector graphics.

I'm sure the Wikipedia page on SVG is not fully up-to-date and improving the situation is a good investment.
A small thing i'll begin with: execute on the ideas i have for the icon: http://www.planetsvg.com/blog/17174/help-improving-svg-image-wikipedia


Other ideas?

A lot of SVG content on the web is not very semantic and not very re-usable. I think improving on this situation would significantly increase the use of SVG.


Last news from WG looks good: http://twitter.com/svgwg