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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'
 David Megginson wrote: > > Rick Jelliffe writes: > > > [ folk other than first world are "disenfranchised" ] > > > > There are four approaches: > > * "that is the way of the wor[l]d": it cannot be helped; > > * positive discrimination, e.g. subsidies; > > * reduce the reliance on face-to-face meetings; > > * universal enfranchisement. > > The third is by far the best solution. Face-to-face meetings are > generally more useful for working out political problems than they are > for technical problems, I tend to agree -- "reduce". This is the 1990s after all, at least for another few months, and it's OK to use technology to improve the decision making of an organization like W3C !! Of course there's a real issue that there DO exist political problems that need working out. There are real dollars (whoops, sorry Rick ;-) riding on this stuff, and those decisions filter into technical stances too. And those political problems can relate to focus and direction (as Mike Champion has noted). F2F meetings of a core constituency can be great enablers; though of course they can also be overdone (just like the secrecy of W3C is clearly, IMHO, overdone). On-line communities work best if they're adjuncts to offline ones, and I think XML-DEV reflects that: there are key players who know each other off-line to various degrees. Outside of W3C, I know that a main function of F2F meetings is to facilitate the personal side of things -- be it pub crawling a new city, or hammering out issues when you've got real person-to-person bandwidth, or whatever. That's also an issue with W3C's intended role, which isn't quite the role it actually has. The intended role (per that article) is essentially "advanced development" (AD) ... the sort of thing that in a group like the IETF is done in very open working groups and without any particular commercial timetable in mind. That sort of AD work is easily (perhaps habitually) done on open mailing lists; that's often how academic folk work, and it's the best way to see what the important issues are (vs having companies tell you what their pet issues are). The reality of W3C's role is that it's putting out specs that get used in commercial products as "the Next Big Thing" regardless of the fact that, in the big scheme of things, they've not been well cooked. (That helps the marketing folk a lot more than the techies who are well represented on this list!) Plus, there's no real expectation that two vendors can just just the W3C spec when they create implementations -- there are no conformance "teeth" as in a real standards organization, again displaying a marketing bias. That is, the W3C academic/AD role isn't its real world role. And that's another reason to call attention to the expense of F2F level participation: it reflects the real world role, not the chartered "advanced development" sort of role. - Dave 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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