[J3] (SC22WG5.6188) RE: [ukfortran] October meeting visa invitation letter

[Daniel C Chen]

1. Time zone vs virtual meeting.

I don't think virtual meeting itself is the issue. Granted we still need to
do some initial set up things
before the meeting, but probably almost everyone has used one or two online
virtual tools.
The real issue is, as Anton, Bill and Malcolm all pointed out, is the
different time zone.
I just can't seem to find two hours of plenary time that is reasonable for
every attendee no matter how
fancy the virtual meeting app we use.
I think this is the main reason if it is not THE reason we decided to
cancel the June WG5 meeting.
Note that I think this issue is even more severe for the WG5 meeting than
the J3 meeting.

2. J3 vs Github community

I agree with Malcolm that at least for the moment or even in the future,
both can co-exist and work
well to complement each other.
As Milan and others explained, Fortran users, especially younger
generations can use it to initiate their
ideas and get feedback from other users and community members. After the
refinement, the
originator can write up a J3 paper and submit it to the next meeting for
consideration.
We tryout this approach already in the Feb meeting this year, and I think
it went quite well.
As far as I have been in the community, I think we process every paper
submitted to the meeting
and give reasons for go or no-go.

As a matter of fact, J3 has been engaged with "outside" Fortran community
for a long time.
Steve, acting as Dr. Fortran, as been answering questions on Google Group
comp.lang.fortran,
which is still quite active. Steve and Bob also bring back some interesting
questions and ideas
from the Google Group to J3 for further discussion.

With the Github in place now, we have one more platform for the users to
interact with the standard
committee.

3. "Day job" vs J3 work.

I totally agree with Reuben and Bill that it is hard to do "J3 work" when
you are present in the
same time zone with your colleges. Especially the subgroup work, which
requires constant
verbal interaction. It just can't be replaced by emails and even slack or
Github in my opinion
at least no near as productive.

Thanks,

Daniel

XL Fortran Development, Fortran Standard Representative
IBM Toronto Software Lab
Phone: 905-413-3056
Tie: 969-3056
Email: cdchen at ca.ibm.com
http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/fortran/xlfortran



From:	"Reuben D. Budiardja via J3" <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>
To:	j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org, WG5 List <sc22wg5 at open-std.org>
Cc:	"Reuben D. Budiardja" <reubendb at ornl.gov>
Date:	2020-04-29 08:54 AM
Subject:	[J3] (SC22WG5.6188) [EXTERNAL] RE: [ukfortran] October meeting
            visa invitation letter
Sent by:	"J3" <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org>



On 04/29/2020 07:31 AM, Milan Curcic via J3 wrote:
>
> GitHub is not a panacea and is not meant to replace live meetings,
> calls, or even chat. I see it as "better email for developing software
> and documents". It doesn't even mean to replace all email, but only
> some. So I don't think doing everything on GitHub is the solution.
> However for what I think is a significant fraction of committee work in
> the time between the meetings, GitHub can provide powerful productivity
> tools.
It does not have to be completely one or the other. I can certainly see
that ideas can be developed and hashed out between meetings in Github,
to a form suitable / complete enough for a "paper" submission to
J3-Fortran, which then can be voted on by the committee, or fine-tuned
during the meeting. This would be completely organic, whoever wants to
join the discussion on Github, can do so.

I like that there is a sense of "finality" with submissions and voting
via J3-Fortran. I guess I see it as an analog to a scientific paper
being sent for review and publication. You can do all your work in the
open, pre-publish it, get reviewed by close colleagues, etc, but at the
end of the day you'd send it to a refereed journal for final review and
publication. In this case it would be J3-Fortran and inclusion to the
standard.

Some would rather do the work "independently" (i.e. within subgroups),
during the meeting time, and/or not on GitHub, and that should be fine
as well.

I am not sure it's productive to require one way or another, or that
everything must be done ahead of time. As was mentioned before, for some
the meeting time is probably the only dedicated time one has to work on
the standard.

Best,
Reuben



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