Any news and updates of general interest to CTWG members

• Rieks Joosten said that criteria-application process is familiar to lawyers because that is how the law is applied. So they have a good operational reason for lawyers to be specific about terminology. Also, different laws can define terms differently. So the law is what we call a scope. The same is true of software engineers, where a namespace is a scope. Also, the semantics people use schemas to define their scope. All of these contexts have analogous ways of dealing with applying criteria to define terminology.
• Rieks also talked about the EU Data Spaces Support Center (DSSC) coalition's work on terminology. It starts with conceptualization, which begins with understanding the criteria that defines what is and is not an instance of a concept. Then a term can be assigned to the concept. So each glossary consists of a term plus the criteria for distinguishing instances of the term. Everything else is explanatory text. In some cases, this can be enhanced with conceptual models aka mental models.
• Neil Thomson asked where the "explanatory texts" should go? Rieks suggested they should go into a repository such as a GitHub repo.
  
  • One other option might be a Confluence "space".
  • The key criteria is to be able to link to the explanatory text documents.
  • Drummond Reed suggested that using Markdown files stored in the same GitHub repo as a terms wiki (and published glossary documents) should be the default choice.
  • Neil also pointed out that if GitHub repos are used for explanatory texts and mental model diagrams, then it will be easy to version.

DECISION: The CTWG will recommend that terms communities store explanatory texts and mental models as Markdown documents or PDFs in the same repo as their terms wiki.

• ACTION: Rieks Joosten, Nicky Hickman, and Drummond Reed to draft a ToIP blog post to announce the Decentralized SSI Governance paper, explain the late publication, and invite others to contribute to further work on the paper. Nicky Hickman will start the post using the standard ToIP blog post template that Judith has already created.

• • Nicky's draft post is here.

ACTION: Drummond Reed to send Judith Fleenor the final Word doc and PDF of the Decentralized SSI Governance white paper.

• ACTION: Drummond Reed to thank all the volunteers for the above.
• ACTION: Drummond Reed and Neil Thomson to work out a process to start the Trust Registry TF and Trust Spanning Protocol TF on the process of creating a mental model for the terms needed in their respective specifications.

Rieks Joosten Brian Richter 

Brian reported that they are making progress. Ryan is awaiting invites.

Judith clarified that Ryan should need developer write access.

They are currently looking at the MRG bugs in order to get it running.

Brian has been posting questions to Slack. 

They are also working on the ingress tool.

Rieks Joosten offered to chat with Brian and Ryan in Slack to answer their questions.

Henk would like to check on how we are handling GitHub repo maintenance.

Henk published this document describing the scope of the problem he has encountered and potential solutions.

We had a long discussion about this issue as it has been a continuing sore spot in our work — and it affects multiple ToIP WGs and TFs.

Henk believes we are going to need to devote budget to part-time paid resources. Drummond tends to agree, but also suggested such resources may be contributed by ToIP member companies who have GitHub experts on staff.

ACTION: Judith Fleenor, Henk van Cann, and Andor to develop recommendations for sustainable GitHub maintenance, including definitions of the skills and roles needed and how a ToIP GitHub Support Group should be formed and maintained.

Drummond Reed Neil Thomson Christine Martin 

See this Glossary Workspace that Drummond has set up. The goal is to populate it with all the terms the Technology Stack WG task forces are currently discussing as a step towards both filling out the glossary and developing one or more mental models.

Rieks Joosten shared that if the stakeholders in these glossaries don't use the right process, they will do much extra work. His point is not the definitions that matter, but it is the stakeholder's conceptualizations that matter. So it is first understanding one another that is the most important.

Drummond Reed Rieks Joosten