 Sorry, y'all. Oh, we're live on YouTube. Hey. Hey, hey. So we're live. And you're live. Great. OK, so minor technical difficulties. Welcome to the Standards Working Group meeting on Tuesday, May the 4th. Be with you and each of you. We are, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about today, but we're going to start with announcements. Does anybody have any announcements that they would like to share? You guys know that I always have announcements. So you're like, no, we're just going to let you make all these announcements. I'd like to announce at this meeting, is that a new time? Yeah, yeah. That's good. It is at a new time. We did publish our schedule for OpenJS World. So if you have not registered, please do. And we'll send you just a little reminder that it's happening so you don't miss it. But it will be Netflix style if you live in a different time zone. So everything will be released all at once. But lots of great content. We're excited. Dope, dope. Let's see. And also in an hour, we have our working meeting for the CPC. We're going to be picking up on technical project strategy, which is great. And so if you have time, stick around for that. Oh, someone else here. I have a question, Jory. Yes, Joe. The document that you shared, I just corrected the title in the page, but I noticed the name of the document is still 420. I just wanted to make sure I'm not editing a previous meeting document. You might be editing a previous meeting document. Let me. Oh, no, no, I think. Oh, yeah, you're definitely editing the previous document. Sorry, I don't see you in there. Hold on. So minor issue with the agenda creation tool again today. So Joe, it's that second and all that. It's that second link is where I'm going to take notes. But now I don't have access to that one. And I will undo my changes on the previous one. Comedy of errors today. Anyone? OK, Joe, now you should be able to refresh Great, thank you. Sorry for the. No, thank you for raising that. That's great. So OK, so schedule the working meeting. And then the other thing, quick announcement that the W3C of which we are a member has announced the candidates for the advisory board election. So I'll be sending that out to our group. That's all public. You can view their statements and stuff. But we'll want to think about who would like to vote for and the advisory board election coming up. So that's an FYI. Anything else? Thank you for the foundation staff. We're pretty heads down on the event. So we've got some other things that are coming up as well. But that's sort of like the top priority we've got like a month to get are not even a month less than a month. Wow, June will be here fast. Cool. All righty. Now, quick introductions. So now I don't know if you've met everyone. Do you want to do a quick intro? Hey, I am I represent Google on the board. I do some standards work on behalf of Google. Or I did my job descriptions changing a little bit. But I'm glad to be here. I've been out only for seven months. So it's why I haven't been dialing in to any of the meetings, but I'm officially back to work. So I'm happy to jump in or review or take a look or whatever I can do to help in this process. I know the next month is going to be busy with the event. But after that, as things move forward, I'd be happy to take a look. Welcome. So long. Welcome back. You missed, we had another announcement before we went live that Sunday is Mother's Day. So it'll be your first Mother's Day. So congrats. That's true. That's true. All right. So on the docket today, we have three items. We're going to continue discussing the education and onboarding resources that we've been pulling together and kind of what we want to do with that as the next step. We have been talking about our joint statement with other groups. And then we also have been talking about, or I should say, I have to report on a meeting that I had very, very, very early in the morning with Marcos Caseras from the W3C who's in Australia. So I've got those three items. Let me see if there's any other business we want to put on the agenda today. And I guess there's one, there's another. So on the W3C topics, I'm going to, Michael, Champion, and Brian and I are going to meet with some of the W3C DevRel people tomorrow if anybody is interested in attending that with us. Just to talk about kind of more of these ed ideas and, you know, liaising opportunities. So that's tomorrow at noon Eastern if anybody's interested. OK, cool. So no other business on those things? Nope. All right. Nope. I guess let's start with the recap of the spec editor community group discussion. I popped a link to the recording that Marcos and I did in Slack as well as on the issue. One of the concerns, I think, that, let me promote Richard here, some had said was like, how much is this going to be focused on W3C process and tooling versus something that's more general? Marcos's experience is largely in the W3C and to a lesser extent, what WG? He wants to make this something that is approachable for everyone regardless of what contexts are coming from. He's just not as familiar with the context of, say, ECMA or ITF or anything like that. And so he'd be looking for folks like us or other people from the community to come in and help provide that. So I think that's something we can do and shouldn't be too dissuaded at the moment if we feel like that issues list is overly indexed on W3C. It's just a function of who's participating now and his experience and stuff like that. So I wanted to share that. Definitely still in the bootstrapping phase of what is this ultimately? What's the work product ultimately going to look like? And he's hoping to encourage him to send out some kind of message on the GitHub repo or via the email list to better define where he's wanting to go with this work so that people can see an opportunity and provide some tutorial materials or how to or include their own stuff. And then he's really excited too about, as am I, about sort of defining kind of some learning paths for folks looking to get into this work. And I think that's also something that our group could weigh in on quite a bit, especially if we want to make it something that's more general and sort of well-rounded and everything. So it was a great and very fun conversation. I think because of the fact that there's a big time zone difference, a lot of this is going to just carry out in GitHub and occasionally via the email list. So and I think there's also a very real possibility that the work that they come up with the tutorials and stuff, the stuff that we might want to include in our resources and our resources list. That's kind of the overview. But I think a lot of you were excited about that too. So questions or anything feedback-wise or thought-wise on working with this, potentially working with this group as a group versus just as a group. Sounds great. I'm supportive. I just wanted to ask a quick question. Can I add the link to that meeting recording in the notes? Yeah, absolutely. Just wanted to be sure. Yeah. So yeah, so feedback on designing like learning materials and that kind of stuff, he's looking for all kinds of things. So this is a public open group. Anybody is encouraged and invited to go get involved there. So something I'll be tracking for us too. All right. Assuming not nothing else on that topic, we can jump into actually let's go down to because we're on this thread of education. Let's go to issue 130, which is the discussion request on standards, education, and onboarding resources. So just to catch everyone up, we have decided to focus strategically on how we can help people learn and onboard into standards culture, as Mike Champion calls it, and get the bigger, broader context of what standardization activities do, what they mean, and not necessarily focus on a specific organization's process or rules, but a broader framework around it. And we've put a call out for resources that help people understand that. And as we're pulling that in, I think we kind of want to figure out also what to do with it, right, like how to curate that and present that. And I think that's really where we're at now. We have an opportunity to kind of pull together just an MVP static website or a page on the OpenJSF.org domain that sort of pulls this stuff together, or we can think of something that's like more complex and dynamic or whatever. And I'm just curious what y'all would like to see if it were you, young newcomer to the standards world, what would be most like useful from your journeys and from your point of view? Do you guys remember that way back in the before times? You remember? Yes, the question is, do we have a standalone site? Do we have a page? How robust can it be? We'd love to launch it at OpenJS World so we can start someplace and then build. My only request is that we use JavaScript technology. It's not Ruby. Just, you know. Yeah. I mean, Joey, if you were asking for opinions as to what sort of content would be helpful, I feel like there's a lot of different directions people would approach standards from or come to it from. And for some people, they may need an understanding of the deeper understanding of the thing that is being standardized, whether it's like the JavaScript language or web browsers or whatever. For some people, they may need a better understanding of the constraints under which the standard had evolved because a lot of people show up with really a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of great ideas on their own. But most of those ideas are often non-starters because of the existing constraints. And those constraints are rarely well documented and understood. And then there's, of course, the whole minutiae about how do you approach a contribution? Like, you know, TZ39 has its own way. We try to funnel people through to like, you know, and each project and standard probably has its own slightly different way of trying to triage incoming content to make it manageable for those maintaining the standard. So kind of like, I don't think that there's a single silver bullet. I think there's just a lot of facets that could stand to be better explained and documented. I like that. It's like you're kind of thinking about it from like a user journey perspective. Sorry, Joe, go ahead. I was going to say, I think, you know, as something like this is built out, the needs will hopefully kind of reveal themselves in terms of whichever standard's body or whatnot. You know, we could have a way to ask questions or FAQs or something. And then, you know, when people do ask, we can either update the documentation or update an FAQ or, you know, yeah, I feel like it micro organically, but obviously you've got to cultivate a garden. All right, I'm trying not to sneeze on the camera. I'm so sorry. That was me hitting my mute button several times. Yeah, I think that perhaps in terms of like organic, because the resources that we have so far are kind of like very different. Some of it is, you know, here's like, here's a list of all of the standards developing organizations and kind of their areas of focus and others like, you know, here's how to read the JavaScript spec and that kind of thing. So those are obviously answers to very different questions. So perhaps maybe like organizing the content in a way that, you know, tries to predict what the question is and then provides some of the answers that seems really sound. So maybe that's a thing worth trying to document is like, what are those questions? And where will we be documenting this? Are we going to build a site? Should there be a repo when we can just start doing issues Yeah, right now we have just the one issue that's like collecting the resources that we've gathered so far. But I think if we're going to do a standalone site, we could make a separate repo for this and transfer that issue over there and kind of get going. Do we want to use some of the time now just to sort of sketch out what those categories will be? Or do you want to? I mean, we probably do have time, right? He's a little bit of a working session. Or do you want to do it in the repo? Jordan had some great starters. Because I think we're finding there is a lot of content, right? So how do you curate it in a more accessible way, right? Well, it's also, it varies a lot. Like I can speak about TC39 extensively, but like it's highly likely that many of the things that apply to TC39 don't apply to what WG or W3C, for example, or Unicode or whatever. So it might be better if we intentionally try to generalize what we're talking about, even if it makes it slightly less useful for specific venues, until we've gotten a lot of input from the folks that have that deep knowledge for a bunch of different venues. Because I wouldn't like, and part of that reaction comes from the W3C spec group, where they have a lot of enthusiasm for W3 specific stuff that has somebody that isn't contributing to those specs I don't care or know about, almost any of that. And so it makes it hard to approach, or like it makes the group feel less like a place that I should participate. And so I wouldn't want to create that sense here either. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I think it also seems very practical, right? Because we want to, if these specific groups like TC39 and W3C, they've got their documentation and down. And the best thing we can do is say, if you get to the point where you're ready to go participate because you feel like you've got enough, go read their documentation. Let's not duplicate. So yeah. And so the goal really is for growing the pipeline, right? So more newbies. Are we sort of all on agreement on that? Yeah. Definitely. And yeah, growing the pipeline and also just helping folks who, frankly, there's lots of people who've been in this for a while and still aren't sure which end is up because it is very confusing. So I think, yeah, that sounds good. So questions-wise, I think people might be asking like, where do I find info about blanks process where blank is W3C or TC39 or whatever? What other questions? Like, they might even ask for the standard bodies defining the web, right? Just that level. Yeah, yeah. So kind of where which specific specs are. Jordan, you made a good point about constraints and sort of understanding, trying to think about how to frame that as a question. Yeah, I mean, essentially, the most newcomers I see are the ones who show up because they're really excited about something they thought of. And almost every time, they understandably lack the context to know why it's not actually a workable idea. Sometimes it is, but very rarely. And it's very tricky to explain to them why their idea is not valid or viable without extinguishing that enthusiasm in the first place. And I don't have an easy answer for how to preserve that enthusiasm while and redirect it to a better idea. But anything that would help with that, that would help people who show up enthusiastically with the idea to adjust their expectations and to push them less towards make this thing happen and more towards assume it might not be viable. Like, let's get excited about figuring out why. Like, something like that. Because I also know that from the other side, there's a lot of burnout you can get as a spec maintainer from having a bunch of people show up with very similar unachievable ideas. Just having to constantly be like, well, let me explain this basic of the language or this constraint or this thing. And it makes it even harder to be friendly and warm to these people because you're burned out by having to do it so much. And so there's like a double-edged problem here that would be nice to address. Yeah, I think just to echo, it's like setting expectations, realistic expectations from both sides. Standards takes a while, and so newcomers coming in may not understand that. The length of it, all of the constraints, and then everything basically Jordan said. So that's something we've seen on Google's side as well. Developers get really excited, and then there's so much red tape the app to go through just to be able to participate. And then it's such a long process that we have internal issues in terms of getting credit for the work they do. So I'm just echoing, I think, setting realistic expectations so that users understand what they're getting into and how to approach it. So I've just bulleted that out. I don't have enough question for me yet, but I think there's probably multiple questions in there. Like what should I expect? Or something along those lines? I think there's also the question of why? You know, why? I think that's often one that we get. Why do this? One of the questions we always get is, aren't there too many standards? Aren't there competing standards? Yeah. Trying to explain that. That's under the why. Yeah. Sorry, I joined with late. No worries. Welcome, man. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. How are you all? We're just working on coming up with questions that we think new people to this world might ask and thinking about organizing information around those questions. And then I think we had also decided, although I didn't record this, I so should, that as an action item, we will make a repo for this website project and transfer the issue. I think one of the most common ones would be where do I get started? And which part of the standard does my question suit? Like some of them would be like 1WG or some might be TZ39. And folks might get confused at that point. And a few in terms of contributions, like I have a proposal idea of then how do I take it to the terms of TZ39. We have Jordan here. I'm sure you would have covered all of it by now. So it's sort of like where or like how do you find out where my bug is, where my problem is sort of question? How do I float a new idea? Or I have an idea. Where do I go? Who do I take it to? Emily, are you talking because you're on mute? Oh, sorry. I have one idea. I will question to that newcomer and myself even, I ask, is how do licenses work with standards and specifications? Basically, the answer is they kind of don't. So it's difficult. Well, yeah, I mean, for TZ39, there's a form you have to fill out that basically says that any contributions you are assigning any relevant patents to those two ECMA. And the effective license otherwise is, I think ECMA has a license. I don't actually know exactly what it is. But it's not so much that they don't work. It's that they don't really apply. It just doesn't matter. As long as your contributions aren't going to encumber users of the spec and you've indicated as such by whatever process the spec allows, it's usually just fine, is my understanding. I agree on that, but it's just information on this is actually really scarce. And it means that if there is anyone, OK. So the specific context in which this came up was a standard or a specification that is not under any of the. It's basically currently it's copyrighted by a couple of people. And it's still a widely used standard or specification, more like. So now, when you start working with that spec, how does it really work? So I'm thinking that there is an opportunity here for us through a resource like this or otherwise to provide ways for people who want to, for whatever reason, come together with a standard or a specification to be able to achieve that and not cause issues for themselves or their users or the collaborators or contributors. Because my sense is that it mostly just works. But there's a decent danger here of someone who's new to this and doesn't think of all of the things, doing something silly and ending up in a situation where they have a spec but they can't really do anything with it and now they can anyone else. So it's a question. That's a good question for an attorney. I mean, I think there's sort of the patterns that people have been following to sort of get the IPR clearance that the member organizations are comfortable with and sort of understanding that. And then there's the other question, which to your point, Emily, is like, I'm starting a new project. How do I make sure that I'm setting things up properly from the get-go such that people can use the project that I started? Is that what do you see? Yeah, and also being able to get out there, the message that even if a specification or standard has just a copyright, no license whatsoever, that doesn't mean that you can't use it. Because it's the expression of what's in the standard of specification that itself can't be copyrighted. So that a part of this question, I'll say this question is saying that licenses don't matter or that this is how it works. But that information itself is, I think, not as readily available as it ought to be. It's interesting that you're bringing this up because my final for my copyright class is tomorrow. And I'm like, well, Professor Fisher would say that. I'm hearing IP and licensing kind of general framework getting started from an end user perspective from a participant and I want to use this project. Our spec, right? So now you're the lawyer. The third one there is, I want to write a standard or a specification. I think we discussed this last thing too about how do we read specification, reading specification itself as an item. So how do we make it simpler for folks to understand what the spec is saying when they go? And the other challenge I see is when folks come up with a proposal, there are high chances that a similar proposal or the same proposal was proposed say like six years back and was rejected for a few many reasons. And it's not easy to discover that, hey, this was proposed like a few years ago and it was discarded for these reasons. I understand it's very hard to capture all of that but there are a few places where folks would go and search some of the forums and archives and try to figure out, but we could try to make it easier actually. I like that. Like there's a, what is the history component and like a history of like the decision making, you know, of like what and why? The good proposals. I think you said, you kind of robot it out on us but I think you said like where do you view proposals? Sorry, can you hand me now? Yes. Question is effectively how do you Google for past proposals that failed? These are really good questions, other questions. Okay, cool. I mean, we'll think of more and I'm sure Mike Champion and Brian and Mike Samuel and others who are frequently with us will have good questions to add to this too. So just because there's this one other topic on our agenda today, I'll wrap this one up. We're going to make a new repo for a website. We're gonna transfer the current issue on this topic over to that repo and we're gonna continue to collect resources. So just another call out for, if you have favorite resources, blog posts, et cetera that help answer these questions or videos or anything, like literally anything, just add them and we'll get them organized around these questions. We'll keep brainstorming on the questions too. So, and we'll make a not Ruby based website for this tool. That's a joke. Cool. Any other thoughts, parting thoughts on this one? All right, hearing none. We will next go to the joint statement issue. Last time we did discuss this in private session because we're, it's a secret, not really but we wanna surprise people. So I think unless there's any other business to go before public, I might then turn off our live stream so we can talk about and work on this. Sound good? Anything, any other public business?