Re: Communication with IG

On Thu, 17 May 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> Jason Diamond recently commented[1]:
>
>     An aside: I'm not on the WG but is it possible to subscribe to rdfcore
>     without being able to post? I had no idea that you'd been discussing
>     this issue to death on that list. The archives are public but it's just
>     not as convenient for me as using my own mail client.
>
> I think that this demonstrates the need for keeping better communication
> with the Interest Group. For my part, I've been linking to the chat logs and
> minutes of our teleconferences on the IRC scratchpad[2]. However, I
> understand that only a small portion of the interest group reads the
> scratchpad consistently. Perhaps we should provide the contents of the
> scratchpad by email...
>
> Certainly, a big help would be to open up subscription on the list to the
> public. Ralph, Eric, is this possible? Currently the amount of traffic on
> this list is small enough that I think that most of the interested RDFIGers
> can handle the additional email load.
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001May/0141.html
> [2] http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/

You're right to point out that this is something that needs more work. My
co-chairing role w.r.t. RDF Core WG was motiviated in large part by the
need to establishes lines of communication between the WG and folks on the
RDF IG mailing lists (www-rdf-interest, www-rdf-logic, ...). While we are
as yet far from perfect on this front, I hope RDF IG members will
appreciate our decision to have the RDF Core WG operate in a publically
visible "goldfish bowl". Unlike the previous phase of RDF work (RDF Model
and Syntax; RDF Schema) the email archives, minutes, working documents and
IRC discussions of RDF Core are public and archived in the Web.

To this end I'd like to remind interested RDF IG members of the following
resources:

	RDFCore Working Group home page
	http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/

	RDF Core WG mail archives
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/

	RDF Issues List
	http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/

	RDF Comments mailing list (feedback channel for spec comments)
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/

The WG chairs and membership will do their (our) best to maintain the WG
home page, issue list and related resources in such a fashion as to make
it easy for non-WG members to keep track of the state of the WG's efforts.
We have *not* at this stage decided to take the "goldfish bowl" policy to
the extent of signing everyone with an interest up to our WG mailing list.
In large part this is because that kind of fine-grained interaction with
the wider community isn't the best use of everyone's time. The detailed
discussions are there to be followed by HTTP (and, experimentally, RSS),
and WG conclusions are to be visible via the WG home page, Issue List and
(eventually) the RDF spec errata docs and new working documents. The WG is
pretty new, and we'll be seeing how things shape up.

I should also mention my goal (shared by a number of others here)
of actually using some of this technology on WG process. For example, I
have scraped some experimental RSS newsfeeds from the W3C mail archives:

rdfcore:
http://ilrt.org/discovery/rdf-dev/roads/cgi-bin/desire/ig2rss?list=w3c-rdfcore-wg

annotations:
http://ilrt.org/discovery/rdf-dev/roads/cgi-bin/desire/ig2rss?list=www-annotation

...etc. Just edit the URI to name the list you're interested in.


If we could that with our practice of using URIs to name RDF open issues,
and the RDF Core WG's use of the mail archives as a repository for test
cases, we have some nice ingredients for providing a richer-than-email
overview of the discussions *across* the various mailing lists and
websites. This seems to me a better way to proceed than to simply sign
everyone up to every mailing list.

Dan


-- 
mailto:danbri@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/

Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 07:43:53 UTC