New Chair for Math ERB

Due to external committments, I will be spending less time on 
W3C related work from now on. With this in mind, Ron Whitney of
the AMS has agreed to take over from me as chair of the Math ERB.

The following describes my understanding of where the group stands:

    o   Asking W3C members for a greater mandate

Following the recent W3C Advisory Committee meeting, the Math ERB
needs to send out a call to W3C member organizations for nominations
to the Math ERB. Existing participants will be pre-nominated. I expect
this will lead to the addition of perhaps a couple of new people.
I will take responsibility for this process.

    o   W3C Working Drafts covering proposals

Bruce needs to write his proposal up as one or more W3C drafts.
I may provide an extensible alternative depending on progress
in implementation work. The release of W3C Working Drafts is an
essential step in the process for ratifying proposals.

    o   Availability of implementations

We need independent implementations of proposals to ensure there
are no practical problems with the specifications. Public domain
implementations are greatly desired, but not essential.  I will
provide some help on this to Robert Miner for a public domain
Java implementation.

    o   Group Meeting in September

Elsevier have asked for a physical meeting of the Math ERB. This seems
like a great idea once we have the W3C Working Drafts from Bruce and
some initial implementation experience. This meeting would allow us
to review the specification together in greater detail and to decide
what steps needs to be taken before we make recommendations to the W3C
membership, and solicit feedback from the wider public.

    o   External Relations

I am conscious that we need to do a better job of setting expectations
for the group's goals and timescales. Ron is investigating whether he
can host the W3C Math pages on the AMS server to give him the ability
to more easily update the public and private pages for the ERB.

    o   Weekly phone conference

Ron will take over the running of the weekly phone conference and
the provision of agenda and minutes.

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> tel: +1 (617) 258 5741 fax: +1 (617) 258 5999
   World Wide Web Consortium, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139
   url = http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett