On Wed Aug 15 21:01:07 2007, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
The XSF is a standards development organization. We're supposed to
be
developing standards. If people want to publish the results of their
experiments on their own websites as input to the XSF's standards
development process, they are free to do so. But as far as I can
see,
nothing in the XSF's mission or bylaws dictates that such
experiments
deserve to be published by the XSF.
Actually I disagree. Not publishing (in some way, it doesn't have to
be as a XEP) experiments and early-stage working documents, and in
particular encouraging these to be privately published, does not
encourage the kind of commonly-owned specification that can be
developed into (or used as input for) a proper standard.
I suspect - without much justification, I'll admit - that the result
of encouraging specifications to be worked on outside the XSF would
lead to fragmentation and proprietary extensions (by which I mean the
term in the sense of not held under common ownership).
A good SDO, therefore, not only encourages open participation (as we
and the IETF do), but also encourages open publication of proposals
(as the IETF does with it's I-D documents, which represent a low
barrier to entry, centralized, publication mechanism). We tend toward
promoting a "do or die" approach to publishing XEPs, which leads to
the bulk of a specification being developed outside the XSF,
potentially encouraging multiple non-interoperable approaches to the
same goal.
This has demonstrably happened with the whiteboarding proposals, and
it's obviously not in our interests - whether that's as a result of
the XSF's processes is most certainly a matter for debate, but I feel
the XSF's processes might be adjusted to try to reduce this.
I believe the best mechanism for encouraging interoperable protocols
through the XSF is to support their publication, even when the
proposal has flaws that the Council require to be rectified. Hence my
comments in another message about adjusting our processes to allow
for a long-term use of the Inbox without forcing publication as a XEP.
Dave.
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