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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: W3C's 'Moral Majesty'
 Don Park (donpark@d...) on 11 Sep 1999 19:06:05 -0700 In http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Sep-1999/0635.html said: >1. F2F and weekly telephone conferences >Without a doubt, both forms of meetings are valuable. Faces and voices >encourage people to work closer and reduces extremism through bonding and >group behaviors. However, these meetings are not efficient enough to >justify the cost of participation to individual members. If the WG member >is an employee of a large company, then the cost is less and even enjoyable >to certain extent. If the WG member is an independent developer/consultant, >the cost is high enough to prevent participation unless the member also >happens to be the Chair. This a crucial point: whether the cost (and the unfairness that introduces) is worth the greater understanding and trust which builds in a face to face. It is not a question of membership in W3C - as there is a way (as you found) for non-members to come to meetings as invited experts - the criterion is commitment of effort and acceptance of the charter. This thread has had both points of the argument made closely and I am not going to resolve it here. I understand it very well: I used myself personally to go to IETF meetings, but I found the three week-long international trips per year was too much, and as a result I have not found it easy to keep track of what started life proud to be an electronic forum for just the reasons you mention. I even notice that IESG membership is chosen selected from physical meeting attendees, so one cannot be part of the steering of the IETF unless one travels. (You can be on the W3C advisory committee AC or AB without travelling. But I have to say, the twice yearly face-face AC participation is very valuable). When we realized a forum for all chairs would be really interesting, we started with a face-to-face. The problems of how to run groups well were so desperately important and fascinating and frustratingly deep that it was a really great meeting and everyone resolved to do it again. But when it came to find a time to do it, no one wanted to travel and we went to phone conference from then on. There is no easy answer. >I have been to only one WG F2F meeting and I found it painfully boring, >tiring, and also disgusting to certain extent. Creativity is discouraged, >progress is measured in number of easy decisions and issues raised, >difficult decisions are deferred without exception, myriad issues are chewed >enthusiastically only to be spitted out and left on the floor like cheap >gum, political complications are raised and usually dealt with sarcastic >jokes which leaves the conflict hidden and dangerous, dinner conversations >are laced with petty thoughts, bureaucratic whining, and blatant discussion >of personal gains. Discussion of F2F meeting location is not based on >reason but pleasure without regard to cost. A meeting at South of France is >great if your company is paying for it but not if it is coming out of your >pocket. (Or if you happen to be someone who does not live in the USA. That is another form of exclusion we have to battle with.) Yuck - that sound horrible. I hope that you didn't come to any general conclusions about all meetings of all working groups. I also hope that you brought this up first with the chair, in an effort to understand and together improve the situation. If that didn't work, I hope that you knew that the staff contact which every working group has is there as an alternative channel. The chairs meet regularly by teleconference and have an email list chairs@w... which the general problem of "the art of consensus" (as the member guidebook is called) are discussed. Other WG members concerned about how the groups work are welcome. Everyone is of course trying to make the process at once open, efficient, fair and of a high technical quality. There is no short answer, but there is a steady flow of suggestions though from the chairs forum (and others) via advisory board approval to the process document and the guide. There is also a trade-off between hoping that people will use their common sense of social sense to be fair and work together, or whether bureaucracy should be introduced to force them to and drive them crazy. I have seen on this list general outcries against W3C bureaucracy, along with requests for more administrative systems to be put in place to monitor working group accountability. >Telephone meetings are more efficient than F2F except there is no room for >in-depth discussions. It is a breeding ground for hasty decisions without >proper representation of the issues. Well, so telephone meetings are rejected, I suppose? By the way, some people can't afford those either unless they are called back. Working groups are largely free to chose the form in which they will meet simply because each working group contains a different mixture of people, financial resources, technical complexity, social pressures, time pressure and so on. This is not something which W3C process puts a lot of constraints on - apart from for example forbidding going for more than 3 months at a time without publishing their results. >2. Mailing lists >Both WG and IG mailing lists are great but unsearchable and private. That depends on the mailing list. The XML Signature list, for example, is open. >Confidentially is too broad and laced with political issues which ends up >reducing representation of the outsiders. Issues are raised, dropped by >inattention, and killed by time. Field of vision in mailing list >discussions is one dimensional (even with hyperlinks) which restricts >awareness and thus limits the level of complexity the WG can deal with. A call for open working group lists. Maybe we should move in that direction with new charters. If you open a group to the public, then you cut the set of things anyone will be prepared to say. For example, an employee of a large company will be concerned lest his personal engineering opinions be taken by the press and used out of context to stir up scandal. As you point out, making the group visible isn't much use unless it also responds to input - and opening up input with no filter can drive a group into the ground. What happens in the W3C - and needs to happen in the community - is that a common problem is identified, that the solution fits >All this is encouraged indirectly by W3C and its policies. W3C is a lot of people trying to get things right. It started with very few policies and was after a while slammed for not having any. Those people who were concerned spent a lot of time trying to improve it. >If W3C can change itself, it should first relax its policy to reflect public >opinions more formally rather than at mercy of WG members' kindness. Good point. Though to do something formally isn't to "relax" anything: it means a lot of hard work. More meetings. More rules - i.e. more bureaucracy. > It should also install policy of independence from W3C bureaucracy. What on earth do you mean by this? Install a policy of W3C (the good side of people working together) being independent of W3C (the bad side of people working together). You are asking for more bureaucracy: rules about WG accountability to public mailing lists. Who is going to be independent from this? >The >director should be stripped of his unspoken right to interfere with his >unfairly heavy hand. You have the shoe on the other foot, I think. It is a spoken right - nay, written. According to the way the original membership contracts were drawn up, formally the Director decides what becomes a Recommendation and what does not. In fact there is a process http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process by which reviews are done, and the director as a person has very little part. There is also an ethos - discussed largely by chairs and at the AC meeting - that we do not count votes, but ideas: we do not simply override a minority opinion, but if it has not been addressed, it is recorded and passed up a level. At the final AC review, a comment in just one review can stop the whole process until it has been resolved. Only occasionally have the staff had to point out that a negative review comment was not technically sound - normally an analysis leads to either a change in the document or a withdrawal of the comment. Complaints about the heavy hand of the director (HHD) or for that matter the staff (who, no matter that they are giving up perfectly good and much more lucrative jobs in industry to be there and have very little reason to be arbitrary or capricious) being unreasonable have historically occurred when the staff have had the indeed heavy burden of ensuring that all the bits fit together in the long run. It is all to easy to design a wonderful and beautiful part of the machine in a working group, and there are documents to read and write, and meetings to go to, a-plenty without having to constantly review everyone else's work. Here we are for example with differences about how namespaces are going to be used. It's not just a question of designing a namespace spec, but it being one which the other XML groups and SMIL and RDF and P3P will find meets their expectations. This is hard work. It involves crossing boundaries of the use of vocabulary. It involves the same person being aware of a lot of projects at the same time. It tends as a result to be a full time job. When the full time person (a staff contact in a WG) has to try to bring two WGs together, it may look to the WG as though that person -- a minority in the WG -- is claiming some sort of divine priority. In fact the poor soul is bearing all the stress between two lively groups of independent creative thinkers. We really need common underlying philosophy about how the future web will work. I have joined in on this list from the technical point of view because I was staggered to find there seemed to be big holes in that common understanding. On my postings I have maintained the right to state my own personal opinion. > Second, W3C should start using and investing in >groupware tools that allows efficient and focused online meetings, >bookkeeping of issues and decisions so that status, factors, and >justifications can be seen at a glance. Oh boy, are you preaching to the choir! There is not a staff meeting which can't be derailed into a three hour rathole by talking about tools we need and how they should work. A breakout group in the face-face chairs meeting worked on "Tools" and filled a flipchart with a small print list of tools which we clearly essential. A tools group was formed but everyone is so busy. Volunteers didn't seem to do it. Actually, paid staff have gotten quite a way. We do have tools to - allow HTTP 1.1 write back so minutes and issues list can be edited directly during meeting; (Amaya/Jigsaw) - track changes so we can take chances, get messy make mistakes - and recover. (Jigsaw/CVS) - diff changes, validate, check links, etc - control access flexibly - so we can be flexible about group membership - create new documents from templates - to save time - bookkeeping issues: event tracking agent (ETA) This is a PHP3/mysql tool which allows issues to be created, edited, tracked. In its early days. - meeting registration; - phone bridge monitoring, caller identification for faster roll call - mailing list creation, management, audit, - mailing list archives we are adding functionality to the open source hypermail right now; - the mIRC author kindly added URI tracking for us; - and so on Of course we have limited staff effort - meeting organization and group coordination and running the website and stuff takes time, and there seems an infinite wish-list. And it is all funded from membership fees which even those who are committing many times that amount in their own effort seem to question. > We must change W3C to fit the >changing needs. Absolutely. That is why the process provides for its own evolution. > W3C must allow us to change it because it can not change >itself. If you change W3C then you add to W3C so you are W3C. >Most of all, W3C must stop being arrogant bureacratic fools with >grandeur self image of being THE innovative leader with THE right vision. >To me, W3C is Tim Berners-Lee. Thanks. I will keep both of those remarks for when my head gets too big next. Let's face it I have this title of being The Inventor Of The Web for some of the media and their chief concern is often why I don't want to drive around in big cars and tell everyone what to do. Let me tell you that W3C is not me any more than Australia is the Queen of England. We are all innovative leaders and none of us have the right vision. But we all try. And you and I reserve the right to tear each other's vision apart. > Tim, you must stop thinking that you have a >monopoly on the future vision. [BTW When you address me please include me in the To: line of the message too!] Actually I was pretty happy doing techy stuff and trying to build a good process. But in the Tokyo AC meeting among other places, people stated very clearly that one of the things they wanted was a consistent plan for the future, a vision of where we were going, coupled with a derivation from that of the work and relationship of the various groups - and that that was my job. I am philsophically very against the "One True Vision" idea and am very happy for others to write theirs. In fact we all refine each others ramblings into the best consistent framework we can make at one point. I try to deliver the result to not just the W3C fee-investing people but anyone who can grab a web browser or a Intl. WWW conference. And don't think that my personal vision thing is all that is going out of W3C. There are plenty of examples where I would have done it differently. Everyone knows that I think the web loses 10 points every time we solve something using a processing instruction -- but the community wants it that way and we have http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-stylesheet/ I still think an RDF property would have been better but there we are. > Instead of pushing your vision, try building >a place where visions of others from far abroad can come together and >interact so that the right vision can be born out of them. That is just what I would love to do. You put it so well. But --- do you mean come together ...by plane? or telephone? or mailing list? From dream to reality, from concept to deployment plan -- that is the difficult bit with social syetems as well as technical ones. > Be a mother, not a father. If you mean, nurture, don't dictate, that sounds like sound advice, though put in a rather gender linked way ;-) Regards, Tim Berners-Lee > Best,Don Park - mailto:donpark@d... >Docuverse - http://www.docuverse.com > xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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