f2f wrap up & next steps

Greetings,

Thank you to the 60+ people who attended the Seattle meeting, many of whom flew great distances to make it. We walked in with two Compliance proposals that were far apart, with neither able to reach consensus in the form it was in. As a group we decided we needed to move the proposals closer to the center, and we did just that. We walked out with an overall direction that everyone can live with for permitted business uses, including proposed text for two of the five we discussed, and great new ideas. We can now see the outline what DNT will look like and where we need to go. We took up some of the most contentious remaining issues, on purpose, and we made solid progress on the hardest stuff. 

I am particularly pleased with proposals that allow business uses to continue while improving privacy, by doing things a little differently with a low burden for implementation. That's a home run. That's exactly what we are looking for, the point where everyone can live with the outcome. That is the hope and promise for DNT, and what we are all working so hard to realize. We still have a lot to do. There are many details to fit into place, some of them quite important to some stakeholders. We will work through them. I was encouraged hearing people say, "This is not what I would choose, but I can live with it in order to move forward." Well done. That's how consensus happens. 

On TPE, editors will incorporate decisions that came out of the final day, and then we will review the final text as a group to ensure all is as agreed. Similarly on Compliance, the editors will write a strawman proposal that incorporates text from four different documents (existing draft, proposed combination draft, proposal from Shane et al, proposal from Jonathan et al.) That strawman is already well in progress thanks to our talented editors. My hope is for a Compliance strawman draft by the week of July 2. As a group, we will then review all text that has not had consensus (that is, no need to re-review text that was already agreed upon in prior drafts, nor the text we agreed upon while Nick live-edited during the Seattle meeting.) We need to publish new drafts soon, since it has been several months since our last publications. We will evaluate the state of the drafts to see if we are ready to ask for input as a First Last Call document with major issues resolved, or if we are looking at a Third Public Working Draft. 

Either way, I believe we will be far enough along for many potential early adopters to begin their work on implementations without risk of redoing major work, provided we are very clear about where work remains in flux. To do that well, as Ian points out, we will need at least one user agent developing a compliant implementation so we can test interoperability. We have already worked through about half of the issues on user agent compliance with one conference call and an hour in Seattle. We'll work through the rest in the fairly near term. After we review the strawman draft, if you are planning on doing an implementation soon and there are specific unresolved Compliance issues that would get in your way, I'm open to prioritizing them earlier. Just let me know so I can make informed scheduling trade offs.  

Our next face-to-face meeting will be in Europe, likely in mid- to late September. If you have a location that can handle about 70 people in that time frame for three days, please let us know the details. We have a generous standing offer to go back to Brussels, though we try to hold meetings in varied locations to distribute the travel burden. Once we know our options we will use an online Doodle poll to understand which possibilities allow the greatest number of TPWG members to attend, just as we have done for past meetings. 

Coming soon...
	- a new mailing list to receive external comments. By the time we get out of Last Call, we'll have a few of those, plus comments from implementations.
	- Rigo will begin to organize the first draft of the Global Considerations document, which will be non-normative. 

To me, it felt like Seattle was the bumpiest f2f I've co-chaired. I am thrilled to have new voices and a greater breadth of stakeholders, but it is challenging with different levels of understanding of the work to date. Next time, perhaps we need a mandatory in person pre-meeting for anyone who has not attended a prior f2f. It's also hard to make progress with the sheer number of people. I didn't scale with the group size as well as I'd like. I have some ideas and will keep thinking about that. And I made it harder on all of us than it had to be because I started to get frustrated. We'd spent two months with radically different proposals and movement by inches when we needed yards. What I learned last week is to have more faith in the ability of the full group to get hard things done, and to trust the process. We're making progress, moving toward the middle, and as Ed points out, we can see where the final compromise needs to be. Let's make it happen. 

Thank you again to Microsoft for the space, and for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! for hosting financially and feeding us. A special warm thank you to JC for taking great care of us in his beautiful city of Seattle. If you scribed last week - thank you! If you didn't - be ready to do so an upcoming call. :-)

	Aleecia

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2012 05:38:51 UTC