Re: W3C Community Group

Hi,

> If you agree with me on having an „XProc“ Community Group, please
> quote this line and send a „+1“ mail. If you disagree, I am looking
> forward for your arguments, but sending a „-1“ mail will be adequate
> to.

+1

Regards,

-- 
Florent Georges
H2O Consulting
http://h2o.consulting/


On 8 March 2017 at 16:55, Achim Berndzen wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> please take this mail as  a contribution to the ongoing and very
> interesting discussion.
>
> I would like to say, that I am strongly in favour of having an XProc (3.0)
> community group. This might be in addition (with personal overlaps) to the
> existing "Data Pipelining Use Cases“ group or not. This group was founded
> in February 2016 in a completely different situation and with a completely
> different task. We thought it might be a good addition to the then existing
> Working Group and we might be able to assist the Working Group in some
> special topics.
>
> Since then: The working group has dissolved, in my reading even some of
> the tasks of the Community Group had dissolved because the discussion of
> use cases is now mainly oriented on the "XProc V2.0 Requirements“ (
> https://www.w3.org/TR/xproc-v2-req/). This does not mean to say the
> Community Group is useless, but in my thinking it not as important as it
> was in February 2016.
>
> And then we have the new „group of volunteers“ who meet in Amsterdam last
> year and then again around XML Prague 2017 in order to continue not the
> Community Groups work, but the Working Groups aim to develop a new and
> better version of XProc. The three options discussed so far are:
>
> 1) Ask all volunteer to join the „Data Pipeline Use Cases“ Community group.
> 2) To stay a „group of volunteers“ and do our working independently from
> any W3C structure/organisation
> 3) To have an „XProc Community Group“.
>
> As I said above, I am strongly in favour for option 3 and option 1 would
> be my second choice.
>
> Why? Having a Community Group is for me important for three reasons:
>
> 1) It tells people who we are and how we work. In my understanding the
> „group of volunteers“ tries to work like a Community Group: We have open
> and public discussions, publish our papers and results, taking into account
> arguments from everyone, being a group member or not, and inviting every
> one to join us in our work. (Have I forgotten something?) For me it is
> important to make this code of conduct public, so we actually encourage
> people to contribute to our work. And this is difficult to do by saying „We
> are a group of volunteer“, but easy if we say „We are a Community Group“.
>
> 2) I think Liam's hint about the legal questions or implications is
> important: If we continue to be a „group of volunteer“, we will (in short
> or in long terms) have to find some agreement on intellectual properties
> etc. Norm set out this questions as issue #1- #3 in the "1.1-specification“
> on Github in September last year but we have not talked about it yet. These
> questions might not be very important for us as members of the „group of
> volunteer“, but as some of us work for companies, these are questions we
> must settle. And the easiest way to answer them, is to transform the „group
> of volunteers“ into a Community Group.
>
> 3) The third argument has to do with marketing, with telling people about
> XProc, telling them its not dead and explaining the way it will evolve. If
> you look up XProc at wikipedia, the first sentence is "XProc is a W3C
> Recommendation to define an XML transformation language to define XML
> Pipelines.“ As a neeby, I would go to W3C’s web site to get some more
> information on XProc. If I would look for the most recent information on
> XProc, it would be „Working Group dissolved“. I think that Conal's and
> Jim’s arguments are right: We might do our work in a proper way, without
> using the resource or infrastructure provided by the W3C. But we might lose
> an important marketing channel for XProc, and –in my opinion– we need all
> the marketing we could get for XProc.
>
> Finally my favour for having a XProc Community Group has to do with hope:
> I hope that our work on XProc might raise the interest in it again, so
> there might be a Working Group again some day. Staying close with the W3C
> will make this transition obviously more easy. Having an XProc 3.0
> Recommendation one day might not be a hope, but an illusion, but an
> illusion I am not prepared to give up yet.
>
> And all this comes at virtually no costs, i.e. we do not have to change
> the way we intend to work or anything else if we transform the „group of
> volunteers“ into a Community Group.
>
> And why not work as „Data Pipelining Use Cases“? Well, as I said we might
> do this. But with regard to marketing, we had to change the groups charter
> and we had to change the name. "Data Pipelining Use Cases“ is clearly not
> the place to look for information on recent developments of XProc. I have
> no idea whether Ari and Nic as chairs are allowed to do this and whether
> they would agree to do this. But as I recall from our discussion with Liam
> in Prague, the name of of Community Group can not be changed for technical
> reasons. But: If we are a group of people working on the next version of
> XProc and try to attract more attention and invite for collaboration, then
> the word „XProc“ has definitely to be part of the Community Group’s name.
>
> I am very sorry for this long mail. I offer one's apologies to anyone for
> using an argument already mentioned in the discussion without proper
> credits.
>
> I have no idea, how to settle this case by using a mailing list, because
> we can not guess the position of people not taking part in the discussion.
> I think we need a consensus on this question, at least the inside the
> „group of volunteers“.
>
> May be this is one way:
> If you agree with me on having an „XProc“ Community Group, please quote
> this line and send a „+1“ mail. If you disagree, I am looking forward for
> your arguments, but sending a „-1“ mail will be adequate to.
>
>
> Greetings from Germany,
> Achim
>
> ------------------------------------------------
> Achim Berndzen
> achim.berndzen@xml-project.com
>
> http://www.xml-project.com
>
>
>