Re: W3C Community Group

+1 !
Romain.

Le 8 mars 2017 4:57 PM, "Achim Berndzen" <achim.berndzen@xml-project.com> a
écrit :

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