Re: Communication with IG

Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org> wrote:

> 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.

I do appreciate this effort, and I'm sure that others outside the Working
Group also do so. 

> 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.

Yet you make the archives of the list public, and perfectly readable through
other tools such as an RSS scraper, etc. I merely ask why this information
is not available over SMTP -- a more convenient system for many (myself
included). 

> 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.

I'm not asking for our discussions to be held in the wider community (as
much as I may believe in that option). I'm simply wondering whether it would
be acceptable to the chairs, and technically feasible to sign members of the
public up to a read-only email list of the discussions.

I'd even be willing to sponsor and manage the system myself, if need be.

> 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:
[...]
> 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.

I agree, and would be happy to work with others to implement such a system.
Still, it seems symptomatic of some at the W3C to allow the goals of the
future interfere with getting something working in the present. Sure, it'll
all be great and wonderful once we build the Semantic Web and our personal
agents tell us everything we need to know and cut down on how much we need
to read. But we're not there yet. Until then, I suggest we keep the lines of
communication open to those who are interested, while continuing to explore
systems that make things better.

-- 
[ :name "Aaron Swartz" ;
  :mbox <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ;
  :homepage <http://www.aaronsw.com> ] is dc:author of <> .

Received on Friday, 25 May 2001 18:12:43 UTC