Re: [vwrap] Status and future of the VWRAP working group

[Morgaine <[e-mail]>]

I'm glad to see some renewed participation here!  Perhaps the threat of
death sharpens the mind. ;-)

Since there seems to be some fresh thinking in the air, I am going to add
two short points to the discussion.  The first is a matter of procedure, and
the second is related to our technical direction:


   - Notwithstanding that the IETF places certain duties on Barry and others
   to ensure that there is visible progress in the form of documents, I must
   say that "documents at all costs" is not a particularly good way of
   achieving technical progress.  It's the "documents at all costs" push that
   gave us several documents previously, only one of which turned out to be
   usable for interoperation between VWs.  Documents churned out before there
   is agreement on goals and direction are a hindrance to the process, not an
   indicator of progress, and they waste everyone's time.  Progress is
   certainly not a matter of just putting pen to paper, as has been suggested.
   Far from it.  First we must agree as a group on how a given protocol is
   going to meet our goals, and drafts then present that formally with hard
   technical details added.  Done the other way around just results in much
   angst and wasted effort, as happened here.


   - Given the almost unanimous agreement that crystallized around Crista's
   thread of a few months ago which could be paraphrased as "The VWRAP
   documents do nothing for interop between virtual worlds", I would like to
   suggest that instead of continuing to beat the dead horse of OGP that we
   still have on our hands, why don't we focus on delivering something that is
   actually *usable* by compatible groups like Opensim and realXtend and
   iED?  There is a nugget of gold at the heart of the VWRAP concept which can
   provide exactly that:  the idea of *shared asset services*, and a
   protocol for accessing them.


There is a huge amount of activity in our sector of the virtual worlds
community.  There is also no end of interest in interoperation, but the
trouble seems to be that each group is rather narrowly focused on their own
particular code base.  Where I think a group such as ours can contribute is
by providing a lightweight protocol which is easily used by all, without the
previous baggage.  Simple problems demand simple solutions, and while a
massively scalable shared asset service is not exactly simple, it is
nevertheless a lot simpler than the much larger task that we had set
ourselves previously.

Perhaps that would be a good place to start, afresh.


Morgaine.






=====================================

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>wrote:

> Reminder: If anyone's done anything related to what's below, please
> post here and get some discussion going.  There's still about two and
> a half weeks to get something ready.
>
> Barry, as chair
>
> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> >>> As for timescales, we already started work on a new Intro in October
> and
> >>> November, as I described in my first email in this thread.  It was
> being
> >>> done informally, not as an official draft but as input to a totally new
> >>> draft.  It was not being done as a revision because the previous Intro
> >>> simply did not meet key requirements for many contributors, as was
> clear
> >>> from the group's very intense discussions of September.
> >>
> >> Can you see if you can get it into reasonable shape to introduce
> >> publicly, and then submit it as draft-morgaine-vwrap-intro-00 ?  That
> >> would give people something concrete to work from.
> >
> > I haven't seen any activity on this, so let me repeat this with a
> deadline:
> >
> > The chairs ask the proponents to please get a new intro document into
> > reasonable (not final) shape to introduce publicly, and to submit it
> > as an Internet Draft with a name like "draft-SOMEONE-vwrap-intro-00"
> > by 10 April (the significance of which will be left for the reader to
> > research, should s/he care to).  There may, of course, be any
> > (reasonable) number of authors listed on the draft, and any one may be
> > the name chosen to live in the draft name.
> >
> > If we're not able to do that, I think we need to seriously question
> > whether there's enough real energy to continue.
> >
> > Barry, as chair
> >
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