meeting agenda

Below is another update for our meeting agenda.  Not surprisingly,
there is a lot of business to carry on.  At the very least, we should
come out of the meeting with:

1. a (perhaps better) proposed charter;
2. proposed rules of Group conduct which specify how issues will
   be formally decided.

After the meeting, I hope we can agree by email on our group rules,
and then finalize a charter.  At this point, we are then an informally
convened group of people with a common interest which will have to
settle again on the same sorts of things when the Working Group
officially convenes in December or January.  One can hope that the
second time around will be easier, and that in the meantime we can
move forward to some degree.

Two months ago, I had hoped that we would come out of our meeting with
some agreement on whether to adopt the Wolfram Proposal, a MINSE
scheme, some amalgam of the two, or something entirely different (say
a SAFIR scheme).  It's clear that, with the possibility of adding
other people from interested W3C organizations and through nomination
(e.g. Stephen Buswell of the Pike project and Eric van Herwijnen of
ISO 12083 may be valuable additions for building a wide coalition),
there is not much point in moving quickly to decision between
alternatives since a display of alternatives will have to be made for
new group members anyway.  This suggests to me that we use the meeting
and the next several months to firm up ideas on alternatives, describe
them in written form completely, and demonstrate their effectiveness
with examples and code (where possible).  I think this is not a bad
plan since we will be building better understanding, although I
recognize that this produces a slower timeframe than we had discussed
last spring.  This is also somewhat realistic, too, given that we're
officially initiating the group in December or January.

With this sort of attitude in mind, I post the following agenda
(containing a few modifications since the last posting).  Roughly, I
would guess that Monday morning could take us through the "Overview"
portion, Monday afternoon the WP, Tuesday morning further
consideration of other encoding schemes, and early Tuesday afternoon
administrative considerations.  Bear in mind, this is **rough** and is
open to adjustment.  Although I've just stated that Tuesday morning
would be allotted to "further discussion of other encoding schemes", I
don't have in mind that this is the only time MINSE and Safir and
other ideas will be discussed.  They should appear as we take an
overview Monday morning, and they can very well appear in contrast as
we discuss the WP.  I also think that administrative discussions
(proposing decision procedures) should fit in someplace earlier,
perhaps as a break from technical matters late Monday afternoon or
first thing Tuesday morning.

It may also help us to leave some advisory work for subgroups to
handle Monday evening.  E.g., detailed language regarding a proposed
charter might be worked out in such a subgroup and then presented
later to the entire group.  Proposals for decision procedures might be
handled that way also.

These are only my thoughts now.  I'm open to suggestions for other
attacks to all this.  My meeting expectations may well be more
undecisive than present group members had hoped would be the case.
Steven Pemberton of the European Research Consortium for Informatics
and Mathematics has indicated interest in this Group, and at this
point I'm not hopeful of zipping through the open W3C invitation
without having several new members join the Group.  I think we'll be
unrealistic to consider we have much firmness in decisions we take
now, and I do think we have a lot to discuss anyway.  The meeting will
still be very valuable as an air-clearing exercise.

Do let me know your thoughts.


-Ron



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Agenda
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Review of agenda, allocation of time to agenda, last-minute adjustment
  of plans

Overview
  review of W3C milestones (without dates) and WG requirements
  review of anticipated working environments, uses, requirements
  review of goals for this WG
  review of evolutionary plans
  review of proposed charter for the WG
  review of canonical examples
  review of information (i.e. data) which will be required to achieve
    various renderings
  review of possible approaches to goals

Detailed consideration of Wolfram Proposal
  overview (from source data to renderings)
  anticipated input syntax(es)
  examples, test suite
  operator-precedence parsing, adjustability
  entity names, unicode representation, fonts
  markup for cases which are not handled by default OPP
  expression tree
  presentation-list
  filtering to presentation-list form
  extensibility
  specifications yet to be made, incomplete aspects of the proposal

Anticipated working environments, real performance
  editors
  filters
  interplay with browsers
  polymediator

Discussion of other points of view and integration with WP
  [with anticipation, topics here can be inserted at appropriate
   points in the discussion of the WP]
  Audio rendering
  Ping
  Raggett
  Safir review
  OpenMath
  Pike
  ISO 12083

W3C formalities
  proposal
  approval

Anticipated schedules, lists of achievables
Working environment (e.g. formal email proposals and voting procedures)