Publishing@W3C: September 2021 Seminar

Hi, everyone.

I'm Mateus Teixeira and I am a co-chair of the Publishing Community Group in the W3C and this is an introduction to the Publishing Community Group, an overview, and a look into how you can participate within this community.

So, the Publishing Community Group at a glance is an incubator.

It coexists with other Working Groups and Community Groups within the Publishing@W3C activity and our goals are to identify, document, and prototype ideas for improvements of EPUB, the digital publishing industry standards, and then it's the ecosystems and dependencies as well.

But we're not just looking at EPUB as it is today.

We're also looking at the future of EPUB and innovations for the future of publishing on the web more generally, including new technologies and prototyping.

You can think of the Community Group as a bridge between publishing and technology communities.

We rally around the shared challenges in our industry towards possible standardization, but more importantly, we're a place for the community to discuss their ideas.

We connect the dots between the business problems that we all grapple with and the technical ideas that might be able to solve them.

To take ideas through this process of incubation, we follow, generally, a six-step process.

First it starts with the individual or any group that wants to propose ideas, and anyone can participate in the Community Group, including representatives from other groups in the W3C or even other places.

Once ideas are proposed, we bring them forth to the Community Group as a whole, and by consensus, the Community Group prioritizes the ideas, especially those that have broad engagement and especially high value for our industry.

The ideas that are prioritized are then delegated to the working unit of the Community Group.

And the working unit of the Community Group is what we call a task force.

So, depending on the type of idea and the domain that the idea applies to, such as accessibility or documentation or EPUB improvements, the idea might be delegated to an existing task force, or if it's a large, new idea in a novel area of publishing, it might even make more sense to start a new task force altogether.

The important thing is that task forces then take those ideas and refine them, identify the priorities and the requirements around them, and then they're also responsible for connecting with other members of the community and other communities in order to further refine the ideas.

That's step four in the process.

Step five is when these ideas become written formal documents, and that can then take the shape of notes, reports, and proposals.

Notes and reports are basically documented initiatives, thoughts, practices, processes in publishing, anything that the community might develop that would help with digital publishing practices or publishing on the web.

Proposals we think of as more of something that would be a candidate for standardization in the future.

And so, the sixth step is that proposals may graduate over to standardization or technical Recommendation Track within a W3C Working Group.

Just as a reminder, the W3C runs standardization and technical Recommendation Track work only within Working Groups, and Community Groups don't do that work.

Instead, we can take up ideas until they become mature enough to be proposed to a Working Group, but we would not be developing the standards ourselves.

So, what makes an idea a good candidate for incubation?

We have, generally, a three-requirement framework through which we run ideas in order to determine if it's worth the time and the effort to incubate it.

The most important thing, and the first thing, is that an idea must have a leader.

A member of the community will need to advocate for the work.

Usually, that's the person who actually proposes the idea to begin with, but that's not a requirement.

And that person must be able to join task force calls to advocate for the idea and keep moving the work forward.

And they must also be able to attend the regular Community Group calls to share progress, talk with the broader community about their input on what they're working on, but also just to be an active participant in the Community Group.

The Community Group calls generally happen once a month, and I'll share more details about that later.

The second thing is that ideas must have clear, applicable needs in the global publishing industry.

Because the Community Group is a community of volunteers, we're each dedicating time outside of our regular working and personal lives in order to move the industry forward.

We need to ensure that the work that we take on is not just something that is something that we're passionate about, but also something where we can make a real impact.

So, third, something that always helps with ideas, not just because it's a good way to make them more concrete, but ideas should have functional prototypes or example use cases at the very least.

Maybe the idea we're working on is not something that can be prototyped, such as a best practice, but it can be something that can be worked out into use cases so that it's more easily communicated broadly.

And that's how we build consensus and how we affect change in our industry.

We also try to engage the broader publishing community through this process.

So, I already mentioned that task forces are the working unit of the Community Group.

Right now, we have three active task forces.

They are accessibility, EPUB, and documentation focused, and each task force will own the incubation of their ideas.

Like I alluded to earlier, the leads of each task force are like product owners, and all this means is that they're responsible for three things.

First, they're responsible for representing the task force and the idea and driving consensus within the community.

The second thing is that they're responsible for helping their task force identify the concrete priorities for them to work on.

And by concrete priorities we mean projects that actually have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that have some sort of deliverable.

Abstract ideas, of course, are welcome for discussion, but it's very important that we keep an action-oriented workflow.

And then finally, contributing to the Community Group's shared roadmap.

This is a relatively recent thing that we started to implement, and the purpose of a shared roadmap is so that we're holding each other accountable for the work that we're doing, but also being more deliberate about sharing and the transparency of that work.

So, the leaders of each task force are also responsible for bringing their task force ideas over to the Community Group so that we can break down the work that they're doing into a roadmap and have a schedule that people from outside our community can also see.

So, as I mentioned, the Community Group's roadmap will be public, and we hope that through this it will also help us encourage new members and also engage the members that we get.

And now I'm going to turn it over to Zheng Xu, who is my co-chair in the Community Group to talk a little bit more about the work that we do in the task forces.

Hello everyone.

I'm Zheng, the co-chair of the Publishing Community Group.

I'm working with Mateus to support the member and the task force for this Community Group.

As a Community Group, it is not required to be a W3C member to join us, so it is a lot easier for anyone who wants to contribute to digital publishing, content creation, or digital reading experience work.

So, currently we have three main directions and task forces from that.

They are accessibility, EPUB documentation, and working with the EPUB Working Group to discover the future of EPUB.

For accessibility, Avneesh leaded the main task force, and they have done many fantastic job to provide technical report and investigation.

We also have other tech reports about Audio Playback written by Matt, and a Vertical Writing Switching tech report created by Makoto-san, and those are all published on GitHub and open to public.

The EPUB Documentation task force is currently going on, trying to have EPUB relate to the tech entry point on the MDN, so we're working with Mozilla to provide more tech report, tech support on their documentation.

We are looking forward to more members to join and help this task force moving forward.

We are also looking forward to a tutorial and use case expertise to help collecting, grouping, and document use cases for the coming task forces.

Meanwhile, we're also trying to work with other Working Groups and Community Groups to form joint task force to solve some technical challenges together.

If you are interested in digital publishing, digital content, reading experience, or anything you think might relate to us, please feel free to join the Publishing Committee Group from the W3C webpage, or feel free to send us email to discuss.

Everyone in the CG is a very open mind, and we are very looking forward to discover new ideas and the incubation in the future with your help.

Thank you.