Re: IG charter: modification suggestion

Hi Funahashi-san

On Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:57:35 +0200, FUNAHASHI Yosuke  
<yfuna@tomo-digi.co.jp> wrote:

> I have reviewed the initial draft charter and wrote out my
> modification suggstion.
>
> I modified the inital draft charter directly, for my concern lie
> mainly with improving the expression itself in order not to be
> misunderstood by people in various industries, especially TV
> industries or broadcasters.

Thank you, in general I think the modifications are a good idea

> I have also merged or reflected ongoing comments and discussions on
> the ML in my modified version of the charter.  I know some of them
> require additional discussions.  So I just tried to suggest balanced
> solutions to them.

There are a couple of points I think should be further discussed.

Teleconferences:

The big problem with these is that there is no time of day which doesn't  
mean someone is asked to be awake when their body is asleep. While  
occasionally they can be useful, making them regular and assuming that  
participation depends on attending teleconferences, rather than active  
participation in mailing list discussions, can lead to low participation  
and problems of remaining relevant.

If people are expected to attend the teleconference to be counted as a  
participant, we waste a lot of time deciding who is going to be asleep  
when the teleconference takes place. In general, whoever it is becomes  
disadvantaged by being asleep, sometimes to the point where they are  
unable to justify the expense of attending, so they stop. Bit by bit  
others decide that the teleconference is not so useful without active  
participation from everyone, so they stop too. This is a process I have  
observed repeatedly in many standards groups, over a couple of decades.

In addition, it is not sensible to assume that decisions can be made by  
the people at teleconferences. Many people are busy from time to time  
(e.g. meeting customers, urgent technical work, business requirements,  
etc) and cannot attend all teleconferences. It makes no sense to assume  
that these people should be shut out of expressing their opinion on a  
proposal.

Finally, holding a regular teleconference without a clear agenda being  
prepared and distributed well in advance, and without sticking carefully  
to the agenda (to enable people to miss a teleconference if they really  
don't care about a particular agenda), is simply pointless. But preparing  
and chairing such meetings is a large amount of work. Given the  
uncertainty about the outcome, I don't think we should bind ourselves to  
this work pattern over two or three years.

All that said, it may be that the way to achieve particular goals is to  
hold a series of teleconferences, so we should have them listed on an  
as-needed basis. In particular, dealing with a particular set of  
deliverables might be best done through a couple of teleconferences.

2. Deliverables:

The modifications suggest that only a particular set of items from the  
Workshop are considered as priorities. I think there are two problems with  
this approach:

The first is the manner of selection. While one workshop presented a  
certain set of issues, and then slected the ones that the participants  
thought were important, both the representation in the workshop and the  
selection process were biased. The understanding we had was that there  
would be at least a second workshop in Europe, and probably one in the  
Americas, and we expect different workshops to identify different  
priorities (and even different work items). This is not a negative  
reflection on the workshop, but a consequence of the process that the  
workshop was part of.

Second, while the TV industry doesn't always move fast, it can do so, and  
the Web industry does so. We should be prepared to consider that things  
which seem important now might not be so important in late 2011, and that  
things which don't seem important now might become important by then.

For both these reasons, while I agree that we should begin the work with  
the concrete tasks as described in your modifications, I think it is  
important to leave the Interest Group with the ability to take on new  
tasks or re-prioritise existing tasks - most especially in light of the  
workshop planned for Q1 2011 in Europe.

> I have not touched the section on `Decision Policy', because I did not
> follow the discussion yet.  I would like to comment it on the ML later.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Tuesday, 28 September 2010 13:53:07 UTC