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"The most successful projects I've seen at the W3C had a small core of talented architects, often just a single person, surrounded by a larger group that had relatively few problems forming consensus around the brilliant original design. In groups that lacked a cohesive architectural center, the results tended more towards the dreaded "design by committee." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/02/01/the-power-of-no.html Micah Dubinko Tim Bray once expressed this as the "get the right people in a room". When repeating that idea, someone asked me offlist how one selects the 'right people'. My answer is 'experience' informed by 'crowds of proofreaders'. That IS how the XML *design by committee* was set up and for the most part, that worked. Feedback over a proven set of ideas is how this works. If the ideas are entirely new, they probably shouldn't be on the table but in the lab. An example is microformats; these are architectural forms come again. Did they work last time? Sort of. Truth is, they weren't adopted widely enough to get the experience needed. This time, the same wine in a brand new bottle is being distributed widely, so they are out of the lab. Ontologies: these are as old as Greek civilization and maybe older. We understand this stuff. That there are mappable competitors (eg, RDF and Topic Maps) means this is a validatible notion. That claims of recent invention die quickly in references to prior art means this is a safely applied idea. That the attempts to make any of these work at scale aren't yet scaling means this is still a very competitive market and that is healthy, but keep track of what is an isn't working when it comes time to converge, re-invent, and 'just say no' because... Just Say No isn't enough. Informed "yes" is the best approach although it is usually easier to turn 'no' into 'yes' than 'yes' into 'no. len
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