Re: On babies and bathwater (was Re: [rtcweb] Summary of Application Developers' opinions of the current WebRTC API and SDP as a control surface)

On 23/07/2013 11:51 PM, Cullen Jennings (fluffy) wrote:
> On Jul 23, 2013, at 10:40 AM, Roman Shpount <roman@telurix.com> wrote:
>
>> I did not know that this is a democracy. I thought that this group is driven by consensus and the strength of technical arguments, not by the number of people presenting them.
> Basically, when push comes to shove,  it is one vote per company and you can see the list of companies in the WG member page. Sure it's a bit more complicated than that but typically, that's about how it ends up with W3C process.  Obviously the people casting theses votes are high influenced by the technical arguments and  many of them are interested in making sure W3C standards meet the needs of a broad industry and not just their companies needs. This is because broad industry usefulness is what is needed for a standard to succeed.

     I think we have a bit of a disconnect there.

     Based on the API I've seen to date, I (as a Web Developer) don't 
trust Browser Vendors and Telecoms to have my interest at heart when 
designing the API, nor do I believe that they have the necessary domain 
expertise to do so. I suspect others on this list would echo that opinion.

     I can think of two ways to rectify this:

  * Add Web Developers as active participants to the Working Group, or
  * Declare the Web Developer API as out-of-scope and ensure that the
    published does not unduly influence the higher-level API they will
    design on top of WebRTC.

Gili