[MPEG-OTSPEC] Defining the text shaping working group’s scope

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

On Saturday, August 15, 2020 11:55 AM John Hudson wrote:

On 15082020 8:12 am, 梁海 Liang Hai wrote:
> Part of the reason why I’m not keen on organizing this collective effort under ISO’s management (be it a WG, Ad Hoc Group, or what), is that ISO and/or JTC1’s publication process is not suitable for the documents we’re thinking. All we need is an easy to navigate modern website with all the vital information we want to maintain, but I doubt ISO/IEC ITTF will grant us that. To be honest, it’s a pain to read those procedural documents in JTC1’s official format—it’s just gonna discourage potential participants for no good reason.

Agreed.

Vlad does a great job of managing the institutional requirements — not
only for OFF and ISO but also for webfonts and W3C — but I'm not keen on
a process that effectively makes one person the interface between
collective effort and institutional approval.

Thank you John for your acknowledgement of my efforts. I would like to clarify certain things because I feel there is a possibility for confusion here as you mentioned two related but vastly different activities [that ironically share similar names – OFF and WOFF], where the roles I play are very different.

A typical way for ISO groups to conduct their business is to collect inputs from different sources in between Working Group meetings, and to discuss these contributions and make decisions when all interested parties are physically present during the WG meetings. The decisions are documented by output documents approved at the WG meeting, and may be subject to further approval via official ballots. One needs to be physically present at the meeting to make sure that his/her topic of interest gets proper attention, and [if there are competing solutions proposed] to drive the consensus in favor of his/her preferred solution. There are few obvious challenges that may arise as a result of this – participants may not be able (not have time and/or budget) to travel to regularly attend meetings, in their absence final decisions may be made without a thorough consideration given to all aspects of technical solutions under discussions, etc.

Knowing that many members of the community I represent in ISO activities may not be able or willing to commit to constant presence at the ISO WG meetings, I made a conscious effort to change the way we do thing, to create an environment where contributions from different participants can be collected and discussed without any undue pressure of imminent meeting deadlines, and where the decisions we made are truly driven by consensus, after all aspects received a thorough consideration. My role in ISO activities is simply an enabler (or as interface, like you mentioned) – to be a messenger between this community and the WG, to make sure that our proposals and recommendations get proper attention and are acted upon (by offering my time as project editor), and to promote this work in the best interests of the industry at large. (I feel I also need to give proper credit to Monotype for sponsoring these activities for so many years and providing sufficient budget to allow us to be successful.)

From ISO WG point of view, this started as an experiment and a favor to the community, and, after many years of successful development, we are now seen as pioneers of sorts, a group that did things differently and proved that we can be very successful and achieve great results with the bulk of the work done offline<https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unexpected-mpeg-media-type-fonts-leonardo-chiariglione/?trackingId=zJtuJM6HSLCtFQ%2BIFiSDpw%3D%3D>. We also earned trust that our proposals and recommendations are consistently of high quality, and the successful industry-wide adoption of ISO OFF / OpenType standard speaks volumes – one of my goals is to preserve this trust and relationships with ISO WG for the benefit of this community!

W3C WG and WebFonts activities are very different in that regard – being nominated as the WG chair I simply serve as facilitator, with the bulk of the work done online by many different people, and where, once the consensus is reached, all the decisions are made by the worldwide community of W3C membership via their Advisory Committee representatives. They’re the force that decides whether WebFonts WG is chartered (and for how long), whether our working drafts are worthy of promotion to the next stage, etc. I have no say in these decisions, other than trying to make sure that the WG does well as far as timeline and deliverables are concerned, and gently nagging some of the WG members in attempt to inspire them to do something that may not be a part of their daily job duties.

Frankly, I would see any kind of institutional approval — whether by
ISO, Microsoft, or ? — as a late stage goal, not something to tie
ourselves into at the outset by submitting ourselves to someone else
defining our mandate and scope. At this point, what we mostly want
institutions to do is get out of the way.

This may be a good aspirational goal, but the reality is that the results and the deliverables of our work are likely to be driven by the processes and policies of a venue we choose to be the home for this activity. And, like I mentioned in my previous email, this decision will have to be driven by real needs and requirements – do we want the output documents we produce to be normative documents, or is it enough to publish them simply an informative source? Do we want implementers to be covered from potential frivolous IP claims, do we want to choose a venue that has reasonably strong patent policies, which may make a process more strict but enables specifications be unencumbered by IPR? All these are the questions we need to ask ourselves [and find answers], before we make final decisions.

Thanks,
Vlad


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