Meeting minutes
EPUBCheck fundraising letter
George: do we know if Tzviya has sent it?
Ralph: I think she would have told us if she had
George: can we ask her to
circulate it with the minor end-of-year change?
… she doesn't have to be the only one to send it
… one of us could send it with a statement "please
circulate broadly"
… send to the BG, CG, and WG list
… I don't think I should be the one to send it
… as Daisy is the recipient of the funding
Liisa: I could send it
… I'd remove the word "just"
George: sure
Liisa: I'll send it Monday so it doesn't get buried
Garth: I'm doing my part internally
George: once Liisa sends it to the W3C lists, maybe BISG would circulate it too?
Bill: sure
George: any other publishing lists?
Bill: two questions: what
organizations would be appropriate and what vehicle to reach those
organizations
… for an organization like SSP, it's less obvious;
many are journal-only in STM and don't use EPUBcheck much
… this isn't exactly a commercial appeal
… I wouldn't see IPTC picking up on it
Ivan: a list for ONYX folk?
Bill: that would be Editeur;
I could send it to Graham Bell
… BIC is UK, BISG-like but I don't have a particularly
good contact there
… there are book organizations in most countries
Ivan: we could ask Laurent to circulate to the French community
Bill: I
Bill: I'll include Luck; he's still consulting in several committees
Cristina: I'll circulate it
Liisa: what do you think
about adding a couple of sentences to make a second paragraph
describing what's been done
… to turn it into something that's newsletter-friendly
Bill: good suggestion
Ivan: and ask Daihei to do the same for Japan
<Zakim> Avneesh, you wanted to comment on Luc status
Avneesh: Luc is still in EPUBCheck management, so it's good to keep him in the loop
Bill: InclusivePublishing.org too
George: sure; I can get it
to them
… I'd love to see many small gifts; more grassrootsy
… there will be a need for continued maintenance
Bill: this underscores
Liisa's propsal to remove "just"
… get this on the conscious of others; there's work
and costs associated with this and we're actively working on it
Ralph: thanks, Bill; if you want to solicit any feedback from us, please don't wait too long for it
How are our three new groups doing?
Ralph: any comments on the
CG relaunch?
… Thanks, Avneesh, for resuming the A11Y TF
Avneesh: yes; that work was
going on in the EPUB CG too
… ways to help people know what books are accessible
to download
… also looking at mapping a11y metadata, starting with
schema.org and looking at ONYX
… we expect a first report to be published this year
… the work will continue; we have to harmonize with
ONYX
… we've also discussed harmonizing MARC21
… we want to talk with IFLA
Ralph: the Audiobook WG call for participation just went out
Ivan: and of course the
Audiobook Recommendation and Publication Manifest Recommendations were
published this week
… it would be nice to have more publicity about them
… perhaps a blog post
… , the Audiobook WG doesn't plan to have meetings;
we'll see what issues and errata come in and schedule meetings as
necessary
… as part of the review we did get a number of
comments from organizations saying they planned to use the
technology
… so we should see more announcements eventually
Dave: I heard there were
comments about the packaging aspects
… related to existing players in the audiobook
distribution
Bill: a focus on retailers, right?
Dave: yeah
Liisa: this points to a lot
of concerns in the market about audiobooks generally; they can be
quite large
… the distribution partners need to update
Garth: it would be
interesting to have a conversation about the needs; note that there
does not have to be just one track per chapter
… a good answer is that this brings a standard way to
distribute a ToC
Garth: do the Publishing WG participants have to rejoin?
Ivan: yes, due to the Patent
Policy update
… and they have 45 days to do that
<ivan> Audiobooks spec in
EPUB 3.2: https://
Ivan: the Audiobook spec is now also available in EPUB 3.2 format ^^
Ralph: EPUB 3 WG ?
Dave: we had the Asian-time
meeting last night
… the participants in that meeting agreed to move to
Patent Policy 2020 after Florian explained it
… given the multiple specs we're working on, the PP
2020 seemed a better fit
… Matt has done a massive amount of editorial
restructuring
… he doing the work of Hercules
… we are slowly attacking a bunch of the issues that
have been haunting us for a while: spine order vs. nav order
… we've come to consensus around some of the weird
issues around external entities
… we're chipping away on the issues
… I see a way forward on the various epub- CSS options
… we need to round up people to talk about testing
… following up from the discussion at the virtual F2F
George: having Avneesh drive
the CG TF and in the WG seems good
… he has a small group to get the work done
… are we seeing the same kind of TF leads in other
areas?
Ivan: the most urgent will be to find someone to lead the testing work
Dave: +1
Ivan: testing is one of the two main jobs of the WG
Ralph: do we know what community we can recruit within?
Dave: the most logical
community would be someone who likely works for a reading system
… someone familiar with software testing
Avneesh: there's a huge community around EDRLab
George: we have some
non-profit companies looking for income; could we do fundraising to
develop a test harness that EDRLab might run?
… everybody needs it; how do we share?
Dave: this is frustrating; WebPlatformTests does not seem to be struggling for funding
Liisa: it's going to be a
hard sell for publishers to fund test development
… it's hard to explain how testing is going to get us
beyond the current state of lowest common denominator
Bill: it's hard to get people to understand that things that they can use for free cost something to create and maintain
George: perhaps a GoFundMe page?
Dave: Igalia has been
experimenting with a similar model for building features in web
browsers
… it's proved to be slow going so far
… the general idea is to get web developers were to
kick in $5 to work on things that would make life easier for them
George: maybe we need to adopt some non-profit fundraising practices
Avneesh: this is a complex
subject when it comes to core standards and technical work
… it's easier to talk about tools than about improving
the spec
… when there's a practical thing people can see it's
easier to get money
… we should look beyond publishers; there are
institutions that fund other work
… highlighting the aspect of accessibility makes this
easier
Dave: sounds like we need a
foundation to do fundraising and apply for grants
… we've been stuck trying to do all these things with
no resources
Bill: good ideas
… an alternative way that I don't like is to sell
advertising on things
… more seriously, the conversion and prepress vendors
are the ones who should be contributing
Garth: advertising works
because billions of people see it
… I agree that EPUBCheck is the lifeblood for the
conversion houses
<Zakim> dauwhe, you wanted to talk about the financial situation of prepress vendors
Dave: I'm not sure that conversion houses have a lot of money
Ivan: EPUBcheck and EPUB 3
testing are not the same
… for the latter the issue is to develop a testing
environment in a way that can be also used as a testing environment
for reading systems
Ivan: we should try to get
together all the reading systems around us to discuss how to frame
this in a way that will be useful to them as well
… then it may become easier to get funding
Ralph: +1, Ivan
George: the Steering
Committee needs to act on this
… we need to put together a plan to raise money
… for the broader activity
… I'd not want to think small
[adjourned]