[MPEG-OTSPEC] Draft AHG report for your review

[Caleb Maclennan]

I second Simon's objection to section IV.

Section III does a fair enough job of summarizing activities related
to the group mandates, but section IV comes across as implying that
everything is now hunky-dory and back to business as usual. Given the
ongoing allegations of abuse, the unresolved proposals for disbanding
or restructuring, and the general level of frustration with the
process I don't think it's fair to summarize as "we achieved a much
better shared understanding". If I was a committee reading this report
with no background in the actual AHG activity I think I would come
away from this summary with a different perspective than I have. I
don't even agree with all of the unresolved things (for example‌I
don't support the proposal to disband the AHG at all!) but it doesn't
seem right to gloss over the actual state of affairs. Rather than all
understanding what "we need to follow", some people are actively
proposing other ways and half of us are basically trying to
work-around what we consider to be a problematic system. Yes we
understand that the ISO ship isn't going to change course for us, but
we also understand the pragmatic solution is to do a lot of work
outside of the ISO umbrella. The summary implies that only out of
scope work is being spun off to other venues, but there are also some
things that could have been in-scope for the AHG that are being
handled elsewhere as work arounds from a problematic venue and
process.

Additionally a more minor point:

In Section V it would be nice if the request regarding the GH repo
could be a bit more direct, something along the lines of "be
recognized as an officially sanctioned venue for technical discussions
and issue tracking in relation to the OFF". This would bring it a
little bit farther out of limbo than the current wording that could be
read to mean that everything needed to happen in parallel. If you want
to add that final proposals still need to be run through the AHG list
that would be fine, but it would be nice if technical discussions that
happen in issues (and only in issues) there can be officially blessed
as having been part of AHG‌ activities.

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 10:59 AM Simon Cozens <simon at simon-cozens.org> wrote:
>
> On 07/10/2020 07:07, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
> > Please find attached the draft AHG report for your review and comments.
> > I would like to ask you to submit your comments no later than by end of
> > day on Wednesday, Oct. 7^th . I plan to submit this report to the WG no
> > later than the morning of Oct. 8^th – sorry for a short notice.
>
> Hi Vlad. Thanks so much for the work involved in pulling this together.
> I think in general it was a fair and honest summary of the past few
> months. However, I take exception to one sentence in section IV:
>
> "we achieved a much better shared understanding of the limitations of
> the processes we need to follow"
>
> This suggests that, now we all understand the processes better, there is
> an acceptance of the "need" to follow those processes. I don't think
> this is a fair representation of what has been said on this group; there
> has been considerable discussion of how to work around these processes,
> including a serious proposal to disband the AHG altogether. This does
> not, to me, sound like a group of people which has meekly accepted the
> need to follow the rules.
>
> S
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