Proposing a Process for Vocabulary Updates and Community Engagement

[gregoriopellegrino]

While the Schema.org Accessibility Properties for Discoverability Vocabulary is not an official W3C recommendation, many publishers, content creators, and software developers rely on this document. That's why I believe it is necessary to establish a process for communicating to the broader community the changes made (adding a term, deprecating a term, changing the meaning of a term, etc.) and introducing a way to solicit feedback and/or some form of voting before making changes.

Currently, we see publishers using deprecated values in their publications (e.g., printPageNumbers) because they are unaware of the updates, or software interfaces that are not aligned with the latest version of the vocabulary. We should consider ways to better communicate with the community of content creators and software developers. Potential ideas include:

• Making public announcements when changes are made to the vocabulary
• Establishing a feedback period before finalizing updates
• Implementing a voting mechanism for proposed changes
• Creating a mailing list for announcements

The goal is to ensure that different implementers are always in line with the most up-to-date versions of the vocabulary.

Any ideas are welcome on how to improve the update process and increase engagement with publishers, content creators, and developers who rely on this vocabulary.

[GeorgeKerscher]

This direction looks right to me.

[avneeshsingh]

It looks that changing existing values would be a major problem in publishing industry, which would need to change their processes. It is easier to add new values, but we should have a well defined process for changing the existing values or removing the existing values, followed by spreading this information.

[mattgarrish]

It's not in this group's mandate to update the epub documents which is more of a problem for getting changes recognized than anything we can do here. The techniques have needed updating for a long time, which I may just move ahead and do even if we don't have any subgroup meetings going on in the pmwg.

[clapierre]

Benetech and our GCA program have been reaching out to Publishers and conversion vendors with all of these new changes, so it is happening at least with those publisher and vendors we are working with. For example the new PageBreakMarkers I am seeing in a number of publisher books. For those getting their spot-checks yearly reviews Publishers and vendors are forced to update their pipelines before they get recertified.
For now this is the best we can do and also speak about these types of changes at conferences we attend, a more grass roots approach.

[mattgarrish]

I'd note, too, that despite creating this group to formalize the vocabulary so we could reference it in our W3C work, we only have 16 members, most of whom are already also on the epub side.

The group established its governance and working model at the outset to work through github. The expectation was that people would watch and comment on changes as we go. We can get more process heavy on this side, but I'm not sure it really achieves the desired goal.

The changes to date have also all flowed through the publishing working and community groups, so if there are issue with the changes or getting them out to publishers, I again think we need to look at this as an epub problem.

It might help to announce the changes more broadly through the various publishing groups. We talk about the changes enough within the CG, but we probably don't do a good enough job of broadcasting the changes out once we decide on them. I don't even know more announcements in those groups will reach all the people it needs to, but it's a start. Getting Ace updated is probably most helpful when it comes to deprecating terms and ensuring that people who aren't following the technical work stay up-to-date, but I don't imagine we'll be deprecating any other terms again any time soon. printPageNumbers was a one-time misnomer that needed fixing.

[clapierre]

Totally agree @mattgarrish , and perhaps something similar to our GCA Technical Bulletin that goes out to GCA partners once a quarter, we should perhaps do something similar to the wider Publishing community for upcoming changes that could impact their work.

[GeorgeKerscher]

When I am on calls with BISG, they are unaware of what is going on in the W3C CG. It would be good to have a mechanism to get them the information. Other groups like BIC and other publishing groups throughout the world would benefit.