ADMIN: Gathering Consensus

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Sun, 17 Jul 1994 21:49:43 -0700 (PDT)

We have been alive for over a month now, and it's time we pulled together
what we've discussed and take a poll for future directions. Mark and I
realized our timeline for the list was a little fast, and that the issues
here weren't as cut and dry as we thought they were (which is a GOOD
thing to learn) and we've both been swamped by our regular jobs as well.
Additionally, a couple of proposal authors have asked for more time w/r/t
preparing their proposals and describing how it could interface with the
WWW environment. It would also be helpful to narrow down the field of
proposals to a couple of serious contenders we can study in detail.

So, in an effort to guage where we are and where we're going, I will be
posting soon two surveys; these surveys will exist on our WWW site as
fill-out forms; I will also be providing a telnet-based WWW client to access
these forms in case you dont have a web browser, and for those without WWW or
telnet access a text form will be available too.

The two surveys will cover:

1) The "What do we want" survey; basically I'll summarize the discussion
here into a list of "What we know we need", "What we'd like to see" and
"What we don't need" for the first draft of VRML. Your options will be
"approve", "increase significance", and "decrease significance" for each
of the options. Based on that we'll have a fairly VRML spec.

2) You'll be asked to pick the 5 proposals which seem to you to have the
most promise as a basis for VRML. The top 5 of those proposals (or 4 if
there is a large difference between the 4th and 5th place) will remain on
the "proposals" list, ranked in order of their promise.

These surveys will be in place by tomorrow night.

Brian