And we've got this thing off the ground...

After taking roll, we established voting requirements for the TAG. To be considered a voting member, a participant must have attended at least two of the three meetings prior to a vote. We need 75% of voting members to agree in order to publish the TAG xAPI technical report.

Next, we reviewed and formalized the report subcommittees. There are ten subcommittees, namely:

• Technology Summary
• Prior Literature
• Implementations
• Technical
• Business and Industry
• Certification
• Standardization
• Cross-Standard Compatability
• Privacy and Security
• Governance and Sustainment

All of the subcommittee members are represented on the report subcommittee document. There is still limited room for more participants to sign up to work on subcommittees and you are encouraged to do so. As a reminder, all of the work of the TAG is open to the public and anyone may participate.

Each subcommittee should meet on their own prior to our next call on Tuesday, the 3rd of October at 2:30pm Eastern. Subcommittees should choose a lead and the name and email of that lead should be sent to the chair for publication on the TAG xAPI website prior to the Oct 3rd call.

Report subcommittees are responsible for drafting the section of the report pertaining to their topic and sub-topics. Each subcommittee should a) describe the state of the art and best practices as they currently exist and b) provide recommendations for implementation. I imagine the latter will lead to healthy debate and members are encouraged to provide a range of recommendations in draft form.

Subcommittee leads are responsible for the drafts. These drafts will be submitted to the chair and we will probably create an editing cohort to stitch together the final technical report.

Please note that our audience is comprised of the implementors of xAPI. That may mean information technologists, data scientists, or instructional designers or others needing technical implementation knowledge.

Style guidelines will be gathered over the next couple weeks. There are examples of IEEE TAG technical reports online. We'll start a thread on the public mailing list to share and discuss.

Of interest is the ongoing discussion started on the mailing list around audience and the nature of our publication. Discussion at this point seems to be steering towards a) focusing the TAG xAPI technical report on technical implementors and b) using the TAG xAPI web platform to provide a place for TAG members to share resources targeted towards market adoption and practical business and organizational uses. We decided to dedicate an upcoming call to this topic and a time will be proposed on the mailing list.

In the meantime, please be in touch with the chair if you are interested in working on a team to take on the curating or collection of an initial set of business and industry focused xAPI resources — including case studies — leveraging the experience and brainpower of the 130+ members of the group.

a) The collection of these resources may help to inform some of the work among the subcommittees

b) the curation of these resources may prove useful to the wider community and we may want to host some sort of curatorial resource here on the TAG xAPI site.

If there is interest, we'll make formalization of this team part of the audience topic discussion and we can set up process and requirements for what does and doesn't get added to the collection of resources on the site.

In short...

• In the near term we are concentrating on the need of the technical report for implementors
• Our goal is to publish a draft working outline of the technical report on or around October 25th to coincide with DevLearn
• We're going to provide a forum for discussion and the opportunity for TAG members to create a team to organize resources beyond the report to be available on the website
• We'll start with a robust baseline in technical reporting, then build up case study communications for wider distribution

A special thank you to all of the TAG xAPI members who have stepped up to contribute to the report subcommittees. Please remember to send the names and emails of your leads to the chair prior to October 3rd.

Shelly

Shelly Blake-Plock

IEEE LTSC TAG xAPI, Chair