Chairing, Superspec, subspecs and WebID 1.0

Hi all,

Rather suddenly, I find myself being the chair of this group. I did apply in [1] but I actually got promoted (or elected?) almost immediately and without notifications of any kind. In fact, this happened so quickly that I’d fully understand if any of you were to disagree with it. Please do give voice to your objections if any, either here on the list of privately via my personal email address.

In my application I stated that my goal would be "turning Nathan’s superspec/subspec proposal into WebID 1.0”, and that is what I intend to do - or at least have a serious go at it. Nathan’s proposal, first introduced in [2], has already gathered a significant amount of consensus and can elegantly address many, if not all, of the issues we’ve been debating over the years, most of which have been touched upon in [3]. My chairmanship is tied to this goal and I plan to relinquish the chair at the end of this process, regardless of whether we’ll have succeeded or failed.

As for how to do this, these are my thoughts so far:

1. Ideally we’d need a new repo, starting from scratch. In practice, splitting the conversation between two repositories would be unwise, particularly given that the conversation is already split between this mailing list and GitHub. I will likely open a new “root” PR for WebID 1.0 which will act as the “main branch” for all related changes.

2. Insofar as I have witnessed over the last few years, conversations about WebID have a tendency to grow too abstract, too broad in scope and/or somewhat polarized. This is perfectly understandable and normal; we see things from different perspectives, we are passionate beings and we all bring our own experiences to the table. However, these tendencies can, at times, hinder our progress and in fact this group has a rather poor track record when it comes to making progress.

3. To counteract these tendencies, I was thinking of iteratively issuing RFCs explicitly limited to one comment per participant. The goal of these "RFC threads" would not be to invite further discussion but to make it possible for me to evaluate everyone’s position, summarize, update documents, determine consensus and plan further RFC threads for the remaining open points.

4. RFC threads would complement regular discussion threads, with each issue being discussed first and made the subject of an RFC second. I think RFC threads would be best managed as issues on GitHub.

5. I am a firm believer that perfect is the enemy of good, and that sometimes settling for “good enough” can make the difference between actually getting to the finish line and running out of fuel halfway through the race. I don’t like half-baked things, either, but I don’t need something to taste **exactly** how I think it should taste to enjoy its merits . You’ll see this reflected in my editing efforts and I kindly ask you to embrace this philosophy, even if just a tiny little bit. 

6. To maintain balance, wellbeing and productivity in other areas of my life I will timebox my involvement in all things WebID so as to keep a limited but constant, daily presence. Please feel free to get in touch with me privately via my personal email address for anything urgent.

That’s all for now. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I’ll take the weekend to mull things over and will begin working on WebID 1.0 on Monday.

Best,
Jacopo.

[1]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webid/2023Nov/0072.html
[2]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webid/2023Jul/0056.html 
[3]: https://github.com/w3c/WebID/issues/3#issuecomment-1051064330

Received on Friday, 10 November 2023 22:45:54 UTC