Monday phone conversation

In his last message, Dave outlined our current standing and listed
some goals for accomplishment in the next several months.  Given that
we're in transition, I'd like the phone conversation on Monday
to offer some opportunity to discuss Dave's outline and any other
administrative concerns members of the Review Board may have.

I've gotten acceptance of a plan to serve both the public and private
portions of our Web archives from the AMS.  More on that as information
becomes available.  I assume that we can continue to use the W3
address for email correspondence.

In addition to formal admission of W3C nominees to this Board, I'm also
inclined myself to converse offline with a number of other parties
with whom I have some acquaintance:

  Chris Rowley, a mathematician and TeX colleague
  Eric van Herwijnen, one of the architects of the ISO 12083 standard
  Dave Cohen and Steve DeRose, employees at EBT here in Providence
  Richard Fateman, of the Berkeley CS Department, with whom I
    corresponded briefly after the Champaign meeting
  Robert Sutor, collaborator in the IBM Axiom and Techexplorer efforts
  Dennis Arnon, former employee at Xerox PARC who's had a long-standing
    interest in markup of mathematics

If anyone has objection, would issue caution regarding such discussion,
or would like to add other people to the list of at-a-distance advisees,
do let me know.


Beyond matters of administration, I intend to review comments on the
mail list and develop some topics for which there may remain question.
Ka-Ping's comments are among those.

We've been looking forward to preliminary implementations of code
rendering Bruce's proposal in order to concretize and further focus
discussion.  Robert has brought several issues forward, and other Board
members will also be able to do so after Bruce has finished his
Mathematica renderer, perhaps around the end of next month.  In the
interim, we can continue to discuss some of the broader issues of the
language design.  If anyone has suggestions on ways in which I can
facilitate matters by providing concrete examples or otherwise focusing
discussion, please send those suggestions to me.  Or if you have broad
areas of concern and haven't yet focused the concerns sufficiently for
broaching them in the discussion, I'll help where I can.  It generally
helps our discussion to have brought up a topic in written form ahead
of time so that Board members can react with some consideration.
I'm amenable to posing topics or helping to give framework for
discussion.  We have a number of levels on which discussion should
proceed, and I take my role as chair as being that of facilitator,
organizer, and focuser, not of Master Controller.



-Ron