Non-sequitur in "Voluntary"

[fantasai]

Copying over from #177 (comment)

The success of our standards is ... determined by the market, through voluntary adoption across a broad set of stakeholders.

This is a great definition, and I think it works well.

What is still not really working imho is the "therefore":

Our standards span many diverse use-cases and industries. The success of our standards is therefore determined by the market, through voluntary adoption across a broad set of stakeholders.

"Therefore" implies that there's a causal effect between the first sentence and the second. But it's not clear to me what that connection is. It still feels like a non-sequitur.

[cwilso]

@fantasai "Therefore" has been removed. Please confirm and close.

[frivoal]

The non sequitur is gone, so that is fixed. The juxtaposition of the two sentences remains, without any clear connection or reason for having them next to each other. I don't see anything harmful in what is currently being said, but I think it does a poor job of highlighting the concept of voluntary standards, what that entails, or why that matters, and I think this is a wasted opportunity.

[cwilso]

@frivoal please note #249 (review).

I think you're intending to say "the conjunctive adverb is gone, but the non sequitur still remains."

To be clear: the editors don't think this is a non sequitur at all. The conjunctive adverb tied cause and effect: Our standards span many diverse use-cases and industries, therefore [because we are not trying to definitively solve a single use deep use case, we are trying to build and solve problems in common across many use cases and industries, so each solution may not always be perfect for all use cases it might be applied to, so we know that such solutions, in each common case, must prove themselves through market adoption, as that will prove that they solve that problem well, so ] the success of our standards is determined by the market, through voluntary adoption across a broad set of stakeholders.

That long explanation is implicit; it was more clear, in our opinion, with "therefore", but it works without it too. If you have some better way of distilling this into no more than 6-7 words that resolves your (collective) concern, propose wording here now, but we don't see this as a significant enough concern to hold up the publication; as it is, the options are "leave therefore" or "remove therefore".

[frivoal]

I have yet to find a succinct phrasing that would be appropriate for the vision. However, in the interest of moving the discussion forward, here is a not so succinct statement of what I think voluntary standards is about. Not saying this so that you adopt my phrasing (I know it's far too long), but in order to share what I think we should be trying to say.

Voluntary Standards: W3C Standards do not, in and of themselves, constrain anybody to implement or adopt any particular technology. We embrace this as a further push towards consensus and excellence: our standards matter when people readily embrace them. We recognize that when certain parts of the supply chain are in agreement with each other, the products they deliver may shape the market and affect what others can depend on, so we provide a venue for everyone to talk to each other and seek mutually beneficial outcomes. However, we neither have nor seek the means to enable one set of participants to constrain another set to deliver products tailored to their needs or liking. This is deliberately left to market forces and market regulators.

To me, the current phrasing doesn't cover that, and so while it's not saying anything wrong, I don't think it is saying what needs to be said either.

[fantasai]

I think what you're trying to say (afaict) can be distilled down to:

The success of our standards is determined by the market,
through voluntary adoption across a broad set of stakeholders.
By proving their suitability across many diverse use-cases and industries,
our standards prove that they can solve common problems well
[which is why this is a good principle].

It's not amazing wording and feels awkward, but I think it actually connects the two ideas ("Our standards span diverse use-cases and industries." + "Our standards succeed by voluntary adoption in the market.") according to the logic you expressed in #248 (comment) (which makes sense to me, but I think is not well expressed in the document atm, hence this issue).

Anyway, I'm not going to object to not solving this issue, but I think it's not solved yet. :)

[fantasai]

Shorter, less awkward version?

The success of our standards is determined by the market
through voluntary adoption across a broad set of stakeholders
spanning many diverse use-cases and industries,
ensuring our standards can solve common problems well.

[fantasai]

I'm not particular about the specific wording here (despite Chris's claims to the contrary). I just want the connecting logic that you two have in your heads to be something I can understand by reading the text of this principle.

[mgendler]

Hi, sorry for the slow response, I was out on vacation, and catching up still.

My reading is that #251 solves the original intent of this issue, so I'm going to accept it. I am going to offer one of two things.

1. Agreeing that this resolves this issue
   or
2. Keeping this issue as deferred to maintain history of @fantasai 's concern to be handled in next version of the vision.

(My preference is option 1, if I don't hear back by March 18th, I'll go ahead with that.)

Elika, please let me know which you would prefer, in either case, I'm considering this not a blocker for moving to statement.

[fantasai]

Hi Max,
I don't think #251 solves this issue (as I've stated multiple times), so I would appreciate if you could associate it with an explanation of what issue it is solving. (If it is not solving any issue, you could also consider reverting it.)

As for this issue, I think it can remain open until someone comes up with a clearer way to connect the two sentences in "Voluntary".

Thanks~
~fantasai