Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Very much in the same spirit is Kent Pitman reflecting on the value of the charter [2] for the X3J13 standardization committee [1]:

5.3 Charter: Susan Ennis (1986)

Sitting in a room for a good part of a meeting coming up with words to write as part of our mission did not seem like a good use of time to me at that moment. But I went along with it because there seemed no stopping it. In retrospect, I consider this a major administrative contribution and I credit the committee chair, Susan Ennis, for getting us to do it.

What I found later was that there were many times during work on the standard where people disagreed about what the right way to proceed was. In many of those cases, we might have been hopelessly deadlocked, each wanting to pursue a different agenda, but I was able instead to point to the charter and say, “No, we agreed that this is how we’d resolve things like this.”

...

The time spent writing the charter later paid for itself many times over and it’s an exercise I recommend to any committee engaged in any large endeavor over a period of time.

Edit: I just noticed that the very next section, 5.4 Cleanup: Larry Masinter, discusses this very point about forms

[1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html

[2] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html




"this is how we'd resolve things like this"

So how did they resolve them?


The charter [1] is linked to in the references section of the untold story article I linked to.

[1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html


In accordance with how they agreed they would resolve them in the charter.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: