Re: Spec organizations and prioritization

(12/03/23 23:20), Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:33:38 +0100, Dominique Hazael-Massieux
> <dom@w3.org> wrote:
>> That's a fair point; and I'm only pushing this because I feel I could
>> find resources, by asking differently.
>>
>> Now, if I were to find resources, I know that the first question I would
>> get would be whether the main editor would be supportive of that
>> approach — both in the sense that he would not see it as a pure
>> nuisance, and also in the sense of providing assistance to help
>> assistant editor(s) getting started.
>>
>> You're not Hixie, but maybe this is something you've discussed with him?
>> Would you be yourself also available for the "getting started" part?
>
> The way I (and others) approached this is by forking part of the HTML
> standard and demonstrating our ability to maintain it and address
> feedback more effectively than Ian. That's how you do this.

And the only such a fork from a non-browser related person was Areyh
Gregor's Editing API spec, but he doesn't really count as a non-browser
person for a while now because he got contracted by Google and then Mozilla.

Seriously, as far as I can imagine, the more effective way of getting
resource here is if we first promise the newcomer that he/she can be
listed as an editor and then he/she can apply company resource to work
on the specs. I know that doing this instead of the "demonstrate your
ability first" approach might result in specs with bad quality (I know
this happened before), but given Hixie expressed opinions that he longer
cares about W3C HTML5[1], I see little reasons why we can't try this out
for W3C HTML5.

This reminds me an affair[2]. It was about W3C people trying to recruit
more "editors" whose first work items is to publish specs on /TR/.
Perhaps due to W3C people not consulting Hixie in advance or the mail
was written in a poor way, that irritated Hixie and Tab and what they
ended up doing was saying that those "editors" can only be called
"secretaries" . They then killed those "simple work items" immediately.
I know at least one person who applied to be an "editor" publicly, but I
don't know what happened after that. Did that attempt fail because of
what Hixie and Tab did?

Is this the best result from the the point of the broader Web Platform
community? Is it important to keep "editors" of high quality? I think
what Dom is asking here is whether Hixie and other folks would again
call these people "secretaries" when the whole point of calling these
newcomers "editors" is to make them easier to get resources from their
companies.

So, I hope current spec editors can evaluate if it is really important
and beneficial, from the point of the broader Web Platform community, to
keep the "Editors:" field clean. I can certainly think of reasons why
that might be important but statements from current editors would be
more reality-reflecting. In any case, I think many people in the broader
Web Platform community, which would certainly include me, value detailed
info about a person's contributions (number of the mails sent to mailing
list, number of lines of the spec that are affected, etc.) instead of
the number of specs where that person is listed as an editor.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2012Mar/0020
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2010OctDec/0919


Sincerely,
Kenny

Received on Friday, 23 March 2012 19:21:17 UTC