[georss] Geospatial Incubator Group

[Dan Brickley]

Gregor J. Rothfuss wrote:
> Mike Liebhold wrote:
> 
>> If not, I am wondering how much visibility will non-member groups
>> e.g. georss.org have on working drafts, and proposals circulated by
>> 'members' within OGC and w3c working groups?
> 
> amen. this reminds me of the discussions when the atom wg was formed and 
> ended up at the IETF due in no small part to it's open process.

Before anyone gets too worked up about secrecy, member-only
standards discussions, etc., it's maybe worth pointing out that the 
silly little wgs84-based "basic geo" lat/long namespace we made at W3C, 
was done as an informal collaboration amongst members of W3C's Semantic 
Web Interest Group, ie. amongst member of the public. The SWIG is a 
totally public group, based around the semantic-web at w3.org mailing list, 
but with a variety of other fora (including use of a public logged IRC 
channel, #swig on irc.freenode.net, where most of the geo: discussions 
were held).

The new Geo Incubator group ('XG') at W3C also has a public mailing 
list, as well as a Member-only forum. For the XG to discuss things with 
Member-only W3C groups, eg. perhaps the Mobile Web guys, ... it's useful 
for them to have a Member-only mailing list. But to discuss things with 
the Semantic Web Interest Group, ... discussions need to be in public, 
because SWIG is a public participation forum. I'm suggestion, see
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xg-geo/2006Jul/ ->
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xg-geo/2006Jul/0001.html

The best way to keep these discussions public, is to show up on the 
public mailing lists offering useful contributions to the work (test 
cases, running code, documentation, review comments, etc.). In 6 years 
at W3C, I spent a good amount of time trying to nudge people to use 
public fora over closed ones. In the SW world, I think the argument is 
won: RDF and SemWeb discussions at W3C, for many years, have 
overwhelmingly been conducted on public lists. As chair of the SWIG and 
(current) editor of http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/ I'm excited to see 
this new group starting up, bringing new expertise and professionalism 
to the discussions. For this work to stay in touch with the SWIG, and 
other stakeholders in the current namespace, we need as much of these 
dicusssions as possible to stay in public. I'm sure at times there will 
be offlist threads, or threads within OGC and W3C Member fora, ... but I 
do hope they'll be a minority.

BTW I have started an investigation into the current usage patterns of 
the w3c Geo namespace, see 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2006Jul/0053.html --- 
we sohuld hopefully have some stats from the Swoogle soon... If folks 
have any more data or thoughts on gathering it, ... do please contrib to 
that thread.

cheers,

Dan