In my previous email, I announced a decision by the admins to enforce
a policy that was precisely the one Joe Andrieu was unwilling to
support: that legal and governance issues be raised privately with me
first. I would like to explain that policy.
Manu Sporny, in http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-
discuss/2007-August/010362.html
The only attempt at explaining this why we cannot speak about legal
matters is that nobody on here is a legal expert, including the
admins.
That is fair enough (it's quite true that none of the admins are
lawyers!). I have also observed over the years that comments made
inadvertently or in passing, once archived and electronically
discoverable, can be reused out of context to significant effect.
As to Mr. Sporny's suggestion that we enlist legal help, that appears
to contradict the current interests of the microformats community
generally, and the current admins specifically: to avoid adding legal
and governance overhead to this experiment.
Time spent volunteering to turn microformats into something they're
not -- standards -- and turning microformats.org into something it's
not -- a standards body -- necessarily comes at the expense of work
on the actual matters at hand.
I think that's especially apt when there's an open invitation to
other, "real" standards bodies to adopt microformats under their own
processes -- especially under the latest initiative to voluntarily
place contributions into the public domain.
Joe Andrieu, in http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-
discuss/2007-July/010318.html
I understand the complexities of going "official". It is not
something to be done lightly. But these issues aren't going away, no
matter how much the leadership shuts down conversation here and on
the wiki.
As I have explained to Mr. Andrieu and others, I may be over-
cautious, but since we certainly don't want to be "forced" into going
"official" by behaving like a de facto standards development
organization, it's especially important the entire community (not
just the admins) be careful in what they claim publicly. Personally,
I'm not even happy with the existing use of the "s-word" in the hCard
spec, either.
Finally, as to "Why me?," I can only say that of the volunteer
admins, I'm the one holding this particular short straw. In the past,
when I was an employee of CommerceNet Consortium, LLC, I began
investigating these issues and became the default point of contact.
Please don't hesitate to email or call me, and I'll do my best to
convey concerns to the rest of the admins and offer feedback on how
best to discuss these matters further on the mailing list and/or wiki.
-- Rohit
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