[MPEG-OTSPEC] Update on setting up the Font and Text Community Group (FTCG)

[梁海 Liang Hai]

Hi the FTCG participants and potential participants on the MPEG-OTSPEC list,

(It’s intentional that the FTCG list <mailto:public-font-text at w3.org> isn’t cc’ed, as there’re already 32 people subscribing to that list and I’m not sure if messaging both lists will lead to a lot duplicated emails… Will shout out on that list and lead people to this thread.)

This is Liang, the acting chair of the newly created Font and Text Community Group (FTCG). I’m here to keep you guys updated about the progress of properly setting up the FTCG.

TL;DR:

1. We need to have a charter clear about our scope, so employees of companies with strict legal considerations can participate in our discussions.

2. We can first have a temporary charter that clarifies the FTCG is not yet for making technical contributions, then we gradually opt in clearly defined areas where we do want to accept technical contributions.

3. If we don’t handle this right, we lose the opportunity of having major players in this industry on board, and this FTCG thing is not gonna be much different from any other individual effort.

4. We can move our discussions to the FTCG (basically, away from this MPEG-OTSPEC list’s protection) once we all understand this situation.

5. Simon and I will soon create a pull request to https://github.com/font-text/font-text.github.io <https://github.com/font-text/font-text.github.io> with a draft charter for us to discuss.

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Background for who didn’t get to participate in Meeting 2:

We had a consensus that we would create a W3C Community Group (CG) for our discussions and future work. See the meeting resolutions and notes for details:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KoknOb0IMAPeiLhifvc_AqB7s3rs6VKOsTQg_oCDypQ/edit?usp=sharing <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KoknOb0IMAPeiLhifvc_AqB7s3rs6VKOsTQg_oCDypQ/edit?usp=sharing>

The initial step, creating the CG, was done not long after the meeting was wrapped up, and its official page lives here:

	https://www.w3.org/community/font-text/ <https://www.w3.org/community/font-text/>

I became the “chair” listed on the webpage because of the CG website’s mechanism. Because it’s not a formal decision but we do need someone to do some chairing work now, I consider myself to be an “acting chair”. Hope we’ll formally choose the chairs soon.

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I’d like to first remind you of some reasons why we would like to form an organization, preferably under some existing, larger organization:

1. IP policy for protecting both the participants and consumers of the content we’ll create.
2. A clear process for making decisions and guidance from the hosting organization.
3. An open and independent space for discussions.
4. Recognization and participation of major players in the industry.

Now, the creation of this FTCG gives some basic IP policy (item 1), which I hope can support us for a while until we start formally publishing some content. About the item 2, the W3C CG has some lightweight requirements about the process <https://www.w3.org/community/about/process/> and it’s largely up to us to decide the exact process (talking about this in a bit); we now also have Florian and fantasai/Elika from the W3C Advisory Board to guide us through the procedural considerations.

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About the item 3:

We do have our own mailing list now (public-font-text at w3.org <mailto:public-font-text at w3.org>), but it‘s my understanding that a GitHub repo’s issues system (or any proper forum) is a superior solution for pretty much all kinds of discussion, not only technical discussions for an actionable outcome. Think about reliable formatting, labels, per-thread subscription, cross references, assignees… Also think about readability and discoverability of both messages before and after your joining. Also think about how certain messages in a mailing list mysteriously end up in one’s junk box.

Therefore after consulting Florian, I’ve created an independent GitHub organization for the FTCG, with two repos currently, one for all public discussions (font-text/community-group) and one for the GitHub Pages (our mini site)—org and repo names are open to better suggestions:

	https://github.com/font-text <https://github.com/font-text>

However I’ve temporarily disabled the repos’ issues systems, because—

We also care about the item 4.

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The thing about the item 4 is, if we really want to nurture an industry-wide cooperation, we need to clearly define the scope we’d like to work on and accept technical contributions. If we don’t a clear definition of the scope and we do start making technical contributions, employees of those companies with strict legal considerations will have to back out, because their lawyers need to review the scope in advance then permit their technical contributions.

The best idea we have now, after discussing with Florian and Simon, is two steps:

1. First we create a temporary charter that makes it clear we’re not doing technical contributions yet—we’re just gonna continue to figure out what are the exact areas we’d like to work on. Those companies should be able to participate at this stage.

2. We then opt in area by area into the charter, according to our discussions. At this stage, we hope we can work with those companies closely, so we play this carefully enough that we don’t accidentally force our valuable participants to back out.

Simon and I will soon create a pull request to the GitHub Pages repo (https://github.com/font-text/font-text.github.io <https://github.com/font-text/font-text.github.io>, because it’ll host the charter text in a web page) with a draft charter (based on Florian’s suggestions) for us to discuss.

Once we all understand this situation, I’ll enable the repos’ issues systems and make sure there’re clear notices in place pointing to the initial charter (that clarifies we’re not making technical contributions yet).

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I know, I know, this sounds frustrating. But if we don’t get this right, we’ll lose those companies’ participation, and the FTCG will become just another project with a fraction of the industry on board. And sooner or later we will need to again form some industry-wide cooperation, right? Also, remember, there’re and will always be individual projects outside of this FTCG (HarfBuzz, CommonType, n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents <https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents>, …), so being a bit slow on setting up this CG properly shouldn’t block the hard work we’ve been doing.

The most valuable aspect of this effort, from I can see now, will be sort of a community center where we have everyone from every corner of this little, bizarre industry, that the whole planet can trust our thorough expertise on digital texts and fonts for any language. We won’t host all the meaningful projects, but we the participants will work on and with them all. Any documents or specs or standards will then just be natural outcomes of that.

Best,
梁海 Liang Hai
https://lianghai.github.io

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