Re: [boost] [text] [review] Text formal review result

On Jun 27, 2020, at 10:57 AM, Phil Endecott via Boost wrote:

Zach Laine wrote:

...

The status quo is that it's simply so much easier to submit straight to LEWG that only a crazy person would do otherwise [i.e. to Boost]

I'm surprised by the suggestion that it's easier to work with the standards committees than with Boost. For a start, literally anyone can subscribe to this list and engage with discussions free of charge. According to isocpp.org/std/meetings-and-participation, the policy for access to the WG21 email lists is they are open to:

* Any member of a national body that participates in WG21, including any employee of a company that is already a member of a national body. [Cost: $1,950 per year in the US.]

* Any person who has already attended a face-to-face meeting in the past. This requirement helps preserve the signal-to-noise ratio by limiting access to people who have demonstrated they're serious about participating. ["Serious about participating", or "rich and like intercontinental travel and don't believe in climate change"?]

* (new) For a Study Group email list, the SG chair may also at their own discretion add any new expert who wants to participate. In particular, SGs are especially designed to be open and inclusive to experts in their field. [So if I were an "expert" in Unicode - which I'm not! - I could ask the Unicode SG chair to add me, which they may or may not do at their discretion.]

I chair the WG21 SG16 Unicode and text study group. SG16 is open to any collaborators. No demonstration of expertise is required. In fact, we need non-expert participation to ensure that what we design will be usable and adopted; otherwise we risk creating expert-only features. The SG16 mailing list, Slack channel, telecon information, meeting summaries, and proposal status details are all publicly available at https://github.com/sg16-unicode/sg16. We are very welcoming! Within the ISO, the term “expert” has connotations that probably differ from what you would colloquially consider an expert; it often simply refers to the representative of some organization. That person may or may not be an expert in any particular topic. Tom.