Kicking off to the Text Tracks Community Group

Hi everyone,

I'd like kick off the Community Group on Text Tracks with this email.


1. Admin issues

As the person that started the group, I'm supposed to establish the
group’s initial operational agreements (so says the community process
page, see http://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/).

So, I've put together a charter at
http://www.w3.org/community/texttracks/wiki/Charter . It basically
states what we're working on and that we want to achieve progress on
documents by consensus.

If necessary, we can change this initial operational agreement once
we've elected a chair (so says the community process).


2. Selection of Chair

The process document says we have to have at least one Chair who is
responsible for ensuring the group fulfills the requirements of the
process document as well as the group’s operational agreements.

Someone voted for me on the members list, so I am the interim Chair
and will facilitate the selection of a new one. I could stay on as
co-chair, but I would like to focus on technical work.

In off-line discussions we have managed to persuade David Singer from
Apple to stand for chair of this Community Group. He has been key to
getting the Community Group off the ground and I'd like to support
David for the chair position.

According to process, the participants of the Group choose their Chair(s).
http://www.w3.org/community/about/tool/#choose-chair

This means we have to have some kind of poll. We could have a poll
with just David put forward as candidate, but I would like to give
this group the opportunity to nominate other candidates - after all
this is a "Community Group". I think we should end up with one chair
only for now, since that makes communication easier.

So, I'm opening the floor to nominations until next week this time.
Please reply to this email with names that you would like to see added
to the list of candidates for chair in a poll. We will then also have
to ask these proposed candidates if they would actually stand as
candidates, so you might want to make sure they are actually
available. After that I will give the CG members a week to answer the
poll and we will deal with the results.

I'm hereby putting David Singer forward as a candidate for the chair position.


3. Editorship

As you're aware from the goals of the CG, we are going to be working
on several documents. For some of these documents - in particular the
specifications - we will want to have dedicated editors which make
sure the specs are consistent and of high technical quality.

I'm happy to say that Ian Hickson has agreed to contribute as the
editor for the WebVTT specification, which  we are preparing to base
off the WHATWG specification. This will ascertain that there is no
fork from the specification that Ian has created as part of his WHATWG
work and it will also give consistency to the specification document
itself.

I'd like to put myself forward as editor for the WebVTT mappings documents.

As for other document: I expect them to emerge through the Wiki, so we
can keep editorship fairly loose as a group effort for now.


4. The WebVTT specification

I'm sure you're all waiting to see the WebVTT specification in a place
where we can all start contributing. Right now, there are some
licensing issues to be sorted through, but I hope this can be resolved
very soon.


So much for now - I'll be posting a new discussion thread about the
semantic model of captioning next and hope for some good
contributions.

Welcome to the Community Group on Text Tracks!

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Monday, 10 October 2011 23:27:19 UTC