At OWLED today, I proposed that we form a W3C Community Group. They goal is to support the activist part of the OWLED mission.

OWLED was founded in order to push OWL forward. The subtitle is Experiences (what we’ve learned) and Directions (where we want to go). We founded it because there was a bit of “OWL fatigue” at the W3C and we didn’t want OWL 1 to be the last word on OWL.

Also, at the time, the W3C wasn’t well set up to do the kind of nurturing of the infrastructure and state of deployed art we wanted to do. Formal standards aren’t the last word in any technical community: We can have rough, bottom up, effective, de facto standardization if we set up the right incentive structures.

The room was receptive so I pushed the button and we now have a proposed group! We need 4 more people with W3C accounts to push the button and then the group is ago.

As[While] I cannot coerce WordPress to embed a PDF, I’ll just also provide a link to my pitch talk for the CG.

We’ll be talking about possible projects over the next 1.5 days. Feel free to drop me a line if you have an idea!

Update: We now have 6 supporters, so the group will be created! Hurray!