RE: " W3C Culture" CG? RE: Problems I'd like to see addressed in Process 2016

Thanks for your thoughts Coralie.  I agree GitHub seems like the right venue for a new iteration of this effort, but I'm also a GitNoob.  Could be a useful learning experience for all of us!

Hopefully we can have some discussion in Paris next week and start on this in earnest in June.  I lean toward NOT creating another CG but doing the editing and issues/discussion in a GitHub repo affiliated with this CG for CLA purposes.

-----Original Message-----
From: Coralie Mercier [mailto:coralie@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 4:20 AM
To: Arthur Barstow; public-w3process@w3.org; chaals@yandex-team.ru
Subject: Re: " W3C Culture" CG? RE: Problems I'd like to see addressed in Process 2016

On Sun, 26 Apr 2015 06:49:14 +0200, <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:

> + coralie@

Thanks, chaals.

I had a conflicting meeting during yesterday's w3process call and couldn't join when Josh pinged me, so I read up the minutes of the topic of crowd-sourcing the Guidebook:
   http://www.w3.org/2015/04/28-w3process-minutes.html#item04


> 24.04.2015, 21:24, "Arthur Barstow" <art.barstow@gmail.com>:
>> On 4/24/15 2:01 PM, Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) wrote:
>>>  http://w3.org/Guide .  I don’t think what I have in mind is a CG to  
>>> advise the staff on how to update the Guide.  I was thinking more like
>>>  a CG to crowdsource a "Guide for a Revitalized W3C.   It might:
>>>
>>>  -  Critically review the  written (in the Guide and Process 
>>> Document)  and unwritten W3C policies and cultural norms to identify 
>>> those that  really work in practice and those that haven’t aged well 
>>> or don’t  align with modern industry and OSS practice.
>>>  - Give open minded consideration to common critiques of W3C 
>>> culture,  e.g. our regrettable tendency to “bikeshed all things”
>>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

>>>  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality>
>>
>> Given W3Process CG still uses a lot of old skool practices the 
>> consortium should presumably discourage (f.ex. still using Hg rather 
>> than Github, schedule-driven releases, synchronous decision making, 
>> weekly calls, etc.), it seems like a more `progressive` group should 
>> be used or a new one created.
>
> The Process CG doesn't use synchronous decision-making or 
> schedule-driven releases in general - it is only the AB Process task 
> force, who are camping within the structure, that works that way.
>
> If the contents of the Guide, or some putative replacement, are placed 
> in github - or some similar easy editing mechanism is exposed - I see 
> no reason why we couldn't just work on it here, and I'll track it to 
> make that possible.
>
> Coralie is carbon copied (Old School terminology and spelling warning) 
> here because she is the listed maintainer for the Guide, and it would 
> be worth doing something to make sure we don't just fall out of synch 
> or throw away the good stuff in there with the rest.
>
>> FWIW, I think the above is in scope for the OpenAndTransparent CG ;-).
>> However, it also seems like all that is needed to bootstrap the above 
>> is to create a new project under github.com/w3c/ (such as 
>> {How-To,Guide,GuidelinesAndBPs, ...}) and then announce the project 
>> and solicit PRs. It's not clear any formal `group` is actually needed.
>
> Right. Although it is pretty useful to be able to explain where to 
> send comments, and know where to expect them to be sent if you might 
> want to respond…
>
> cheers

I was part of several past efforts, the most recent being "Modern Guide", a project stemming from TPAC2011 about... crowd-sourcing the Guidebook.
cf. https://www.w3.org/wiki/ModernGuide


The group was active between September 2012 and January 2013. The effort was overtaken by events and other priorities. We closed it in February this year at the time of the Ian-Coralie transition.

That group proposed to migrate the Guidebook to a wiki in order to make content easier to maintain, easier to discover, edit, and flag for review.
We made a prototype (plus a myriad other local drafts from 2013 and 2014 that reside both on Ian's hard drive and mine but weren't an improvement over the prototype):
cf. https://www.w3.org/wiki/Guide


In terms of Editorial Control, we thought that 1) most pages would be maintainable by the community while 2) some pages needed to remain editable by Team only while allowing annotations or pages discussions (Talk).

Github appears to be an even better venue with even better contribution mechanisms for such an effort. I would support the crowd-source approach for the Guidebook (it was already how we envisioned things with ModernGuide), as the W3C MarComm team had to pick other priorities but some oversight makes sense, and is feasible.

There are portions of the Guidebook that are specific to Groups progressing on specs; that aspect would be jointly overseen by Comm team and Philippe Le Hégaret who took over "Publications (policies and tools)"  
and "Member Submissions", or overseen by PLH only.

I am not familiar with Github yet, but I feel a growing pressure to really go out and find a beginner's guide to Github (or "GitNoob", or "I survived CVS and wikis, I'm ready for github".)

Coralie

--
Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Marketing & Communications -  http://www.w3.org mailto:coralie@w3.org +336 4322 0001 http://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/

Received on Wednesday, 29 April 2015 15:23:22 UTC