Re: Process quibble Re: Joint meeting ... on ... aria issues

Hi, Chaals-

This is my fault.  I did make clear that I saw this as an informal 
investigatory call, and that no commitments would be made.  However, as 
an employee of W3C, I should have made more effort to see that all 
parties were fairly represented.  I'm still inexperienced in my role, 
and perhaps overstepped my bounds even with the precautions I took.

In my defense, I did talk about this with some W3C Team members (Michael 
Cooper of WAI, and others, and Steven was planned to attend as well), 
and with the SVG WG; I tried to be careful in setting potential goals 
for the meeting; and I asked that public minutes be published.  I didn't 
expect to be the sole W3C person who was on the call, nor for Rich to be 
the only XHTML2 WG member.

But I will also say that despite strong feelings on all side, we all 
came to this with good intentions and everyone was civil and respectful, 
and made good technical arguments.

I will be more careful about such things in the future, and hope we can 
continue this dialog with more people and more perspectives involved.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Staff Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Charles McCathieNevile wrote (on 10/17/2007 1:39 PM):
> 
> Hi Rich,
> 
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:26:00 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger 
> <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
>> If it were publicly available (HTML, XHTML, SVG) we could potentially 
>> have 100 people on the call. As it was it was a challenge to minute
>> this. I do not want to manage a call of that size and we need to get
>> things moving forward.
> 
> While I appreaciate the issue if 100 people *do* turn up, I think that 
> it is counter to the agreement under which the public groups work to set 
> up a private meeting with your chosen set of participants.
> 
> There is a precedent for each group selecting people to represent it 
> (e.g. Forms task force) which is much more in line with W3C process. It 
> can take a little longer to set up, but it should resolve problems like 
> half a group feeling they are unrepresented and then having to decide 
> whether there is some material impact (apart from a round of emails from 
> "Outraged of Oslo" and "Misrepresented of Mississippi" pointing out that 
> they *could* have been unrepresented).
> 
> Perhaps it is a better idea to get the groups to formally appoint a task 
> force where relevant. It certainly reduces the opportunities to accuse 
> you of doing it with some bias or other.
> 
>> The people involved were leaders trying to adopt aria in html,
>> svg, and xhtml.
> 
> The people chosen were *some of* the leaders in adopting ARIA, I think. 
> Possibly a very representative sample, even. But there is a difference.
> 
>> I felt it would be more productive to get the leaders to agree on some
>> proposals and then take them back to their respective groups for
>> discussion. I have posted the minutes on the xhtml 2, html, and pf lists.
> 
> When working outside W3C process like this, I am very glad that you took 
> minutes and posted them to the relevant groups. That's vastly superior 
> to just editing a spec in such a way that the group does not know where 
> the change came from or why.
> 
> So thank you for doing that.
> 
> cheers
> 
> Chaals (aka "Get 2 cents in of Getafe")
> 

--

Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2007 18:25:40 UTC