F2F at XML 2003

[Patrick Durusau <Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org>]

Please respond with available times by: November 3rd. I hope to have 
email while in France (Nov. 3-10) and will post the meeting date by 
November 7.

Greetings!

It seems to me that we need to have a F2F meeting at XML 2003. There 
will be meeting rooms available and I am aware that we all have other 
commitments during the conference.

Assuming that the discussion of deliverables continues to be fruitful 
(special thanks to Mary, Suellen, Lars and Bernard for taking up this 
thread), I think the focus should be on teasing out the various parts of 
the deliverables and looking for volunteers for the various parts.

I checked charter and we don't have regular meetings defined and we do 
need a qurom to conduct business so I am asking for PubSubj TC members 
to indicate their open dates/times during XML 2003 to attend a meeting 
of the PubSubj TC.

Agenda:

1. Deliverables: What can we deliver in draft, proposal, etc., in 3 
months, 6 months, 1 year?

Note I do not view the current list of deliverables as some sort of 
legal contract. As we go through the process we learn more about the 
standard and its requirements and so it is quite natural that our view 
of deliverables today may not be what we envisioned at the beginning. 
Not saying we should deliver anything we please, certainly don't want to 
start working on a TCP/IP protocol standard, but that we should 
interpret our "deliverables" to be what is required for published 
subjects to be a viable standard.

2. Assignments/volunteers for the deliverables in #1.

I anticipate that the meeting will last for 2 hours.

Now, you may be asking, how we can cover all the issues that are 
outstanding in two hours? Good question, we can't. ;-)

However, if we make use of this mailing list we can all have a list of 
deliverables for #1 in hand before the meeting and with some on list 
discussion, we will already know our respective positions. (And 
hopefully have some informal agreement on which ones should move to the 
fore and who will be taking them on as projects.)

The purpose of the meeting is to allow us to verify what we think is a 
common consensus on the deliverables and to (hopefully) enlist others in 
the work on whatever deliverables are approved by the group. Realize 
that our personal favorites for deliverables may not get picked in the 
first round but the answer to that is to help on those that are so we 
can more quickly reach the ones of interest to us.

I was particularly struck by a statement Bernard made in the 
deliverables thread and I am quoting it completely out of context 
(apologies Bernard) but I think it bears repetition:

> So we can't be agnostic about human process, ontological commitment,
> community of users, and the like. We are at a core of a very difficult
> problem in which the ratio human/technical is certainly over 80/20.

While I interpreted this with reference to published subjects, I think 
it is also quite applicable to the process of developing standards for 
published subjects.

We all have our own motives and agendas that we see being furthered by 
published subjects and that is quite normal and to be expected. What is 
required to move this process forward is finding deliverables that serve 
enough of those interests well enough for us to form a community capable 
of doing the technical work (as well as attracting others).

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!