Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
This one is definitely with co-Chair hat on...
On Sep 4, 2009, at 4:08 PM, John Foliot wrote:
If ever there was a damning indictment of WHAT WG's use of the IRC
back-channel to 'make decisions' without due consultation, here it is.
It is now water long-gone under the bridge, but even recent discussion
(http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090904#l-322 ) shows that this
lesson has not been learned.
IF YOU HAVE PROPOSALS - POST THEM PUBLICLY (and at both your club and W3C
mailing lists) - play by your own rules!
Just to make it clear to everyone:
We prefer people to make technical proposals in official Working Group
channels, such as the public-html mailing list or w3c bugzilla. However,
people are free to discuss technical issues regarding HTML5 wherever
they wish, even if that conversation involves the editor. And even if
that discussion is on a logged IRC channel, on twitter, in blog
comments, or on a private invite-only mailing list. It's healthier if a
lot of that discussion happens here, but you don't have to stop thinking
about HTML5 in other media.
If anyone has a technical disagreement with something in the spec, or a
question about why something works a certain way, please do voice it. If
you have a complaint about where people hold their conversations, then I
would ask you to please hold your fire.
Now, it's possible for conversation to retreat so much into fragmented
spaces that it becomes impossible to follow the work and participate
meaningfully. If that actually happens in a concrete case, please point
it out to the chairs. However, I don't think that is happening on the
current round of discussing <aside> and the other structural elements. I
see lots of healthy technical discussion on the list. So let's focus
more on that constructive technical discussion and less on process issues.
If anyone wants to discuss this topic further, please follow up
privately or on www-archive.
I'll take a co-chair's exception to the last sentence :-)
I simply want to endorse Maciej's message. This discussion happened to
take place on IRC between Ian and Lachy, but it could just have easily
taken place F2F between Ian and John at the TPAC.
Forbidding discussion elsewhere just tends to drive it underground. So
instead of forbidding it, the rule is that no final decisions on the
content of the W3C spec will be made outside of public-html, and every
attempt will be made to use subject lines, copying people who have
expressed an interest, and the weekly teleconference to be inclusive.
Should Ian have decided to act on this thought, and if somebody were to
disagree with that action, simply file a bug report. And should the bug
report not be resolved to your satisfaction, there will be ample
opportunity to escalate the issue further.
Thanks,
Maciej
- Sam Ruby
