Lifetime and stability of the weblitstd

[Kevin Turner]

One of the questions that it can be useful to ask when building things is
"How long do we need this to last?" Or framed another way, when discussing
living code or documents, "How stable does this need to be?"

Sometimes you can say "this is primarily a resource for the next hackfest,
so it has to stay up for the duration of the event but might be just a
historical reference after that." On the other hand, other things (such
as, say, authentication protocols) have a high adoption and change cost,
and tomorrow's implementations will need to be interoperable with those for
the next ten years or more.

Much software written for the web falls into a middle category, but it's
closer to the first: we expect this resource to be around *in some form* for
a while, but the version two years from now may look substantially
different from today's, with lots of steps in between.

Which category do you see the Web Literacy Standard falling in to?

I ask because the sort of discussions I've been hearing for the last few
weeks are very high-level and inclusive and probably important to be
thorough with if you need a durable document that you have to get right the
first time.

It can also pretty frustrating to us agile engineer types who believe that
you learn the most and get the best product when you do lots of iterations,
incorporating frequent feedback from your audience.

I imagine a stable document is important if you're seeking adoption by
large-scale processes, i.e. to be able to say "Our organization has shown X
measure of effectiveness in helping people achieve web literacy according
to the Web LIteracy Standard, and thus we are eligible for such-and-such
funding."

I can also imagine that stability is relatively unimportant to many users,
such as those who are looking for something to help them plan next
semester's coursework. But if the Fall 2013 course differs in some aspects
from the Spring 2013 course, that's no great loss — and given the highly
dynamic nature of the web, may even be a plus.


For my own purposes (and those, I believe, of Code Scouts), I wouldn't mind
if there's a new version of the Web Literacy Standard every year. Even
mid-year revisions would be acceptable if they didn't turn the whole thing
upside down. How do others see it?

[Benjamin Moskowitz]

I feel the same way as Kevin—at least until there's traction and congealing, seems smart to move fast, MVP, iterate, all that good stuff.

Web speed!

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[Doug Belshaw]

Thanks for raising this, Kevin. To my mind we need broad brushstrokes that become ever-more granular as we iterate.

When we discussed a 'draft version' for the end of March this is what I mean, I guess. :-)

-----
Doug Belshaw
Badges & Skills Lead
Mozilla Foundation

[Doug Belshaw]