Re: Editing TTML

All,


I owe you a follow-up to my email from 8th July concerning the Editorship of TTML, after a long pause, caused partly because this is a difficult email to write and get the correct tone while saying what needs to be said - please put your “forgiving” hat on in case I get things a little awry.


For information, the period since then included an escalation to an Ombudsperson as allowed for by the W3C’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (CEPC). This escalation concerned my behaviour and specifically that email. Such an escalation is made confidentially; I’m sharing it with permission because we are all bound by the CEPC and I want to publicise that this route is available if needed and nobody is exempt from it. In this case, in sending this, with agreement from Glenn, that period of mediation is being drawn to a close; in the end Glenn and I resolved this by ourselves without needing any formal steps to be taken by the Ombudsperson.


I have apologised privately to Glenn for issuing the notice publicly, and stand by that apology. There are times when a Chair needs to step in to address behaviours in a group, and I believe that was such a time, but there are ways of doing this that do not involve public naming and shaming, and I should not have intervened in that way. Hopefully I’ll learn from this, and if there’s ever any need to do something like this in the future I’ll begin with a more private approach.


Thank you to those group members who came forward to tell me they thought I’d got this wrong; you know who you are.


In my email of 8th July I declared that I would assess the group’s progress in a month to see if I could remove the notice. There are two things I’d like to call attention to:


Firstly, very soon after that email there was a nadir of group relations when it came to handling the TTML2 pull request #1101. Setting aside the rights and wrongs of the way that pull request got processed, I want to recognise that pretty much everyone involved ended up feeling bad about it for one reason or another. I imagine we’ve all reflected on that, I know Glenn and I have. I doubt very much that anyone wants a repeat of that.


If it isn’t obvious, we should take it as an example for what not to do in future; instead, if there are disagreements brewing, we need to assume positive intent in others, be clear in our communications, including, if we have multiple roles, being explicit about which role we are adopting. On the positive side, we did end up with a resolution that everyone could accept.


Secondly, after we got over that hurdle, it seems to me that TTWG has been working in a way that feels more collaborative, from all members, which is what we need to make progress. I’m more than happy to continue working with Glenn as an Editor of TTML and to receive the benefit of his experience and energy.


I’m sure we all share the goal that the TTWG works collaboratively and effectively within the boundaries set by the CEPC and the working requirements of the W3C Process. We each can help achieve this by making sure that the way we interact with each other works with that goal rather than against it, and that often means managing our own responses as well as reacting to others’. I include myself here of course.


Kind regards,


Nigel