OCWG Meeting № 1 Recap

[jessmartin]

Meeting № 1 Summary

Here's the recording of the meeting , if you'd like to watch.
Here's a transcript of the meeting, if you'd prefer to read.

It was good to meet with you at the first meeting of the OCWG! We had a good group for our first discussion with the following projects participating:

• Excalidraw
• Graphinout
• Nodebook.io
• React Flow
• SAGE3
• TLDraw
• Zwibbler
• DXOS

Agenda
For the first meeting we are aiming to align on specific goals and success criteria for OCWG, time-bound initiatives and next steps.

Meeting Summary
The OCWG meeting № 1 focused on the following key points:

1. Introduction: The meeting opened with a reminder of the group's purpose: to enable interoperability across different infinite canvas tools.
2. Meeting Structure: An exporatory discussion with a focus on understanding participants' interests and the specific projects they are involved in.
3. Interop Goals: Near-term goals were discussed, with an emphasis on breaking these down into smaller, manageable projects with an intent is to work towards interoperability through incremental steps.
4. JSON Canvas Discussion: The group discussed the JSONCanvas format, initially developed for Obsidian. While recognized as a good starting point, there was consensus on the need for its evolution to accommodate a broader range of use cases and increased extensibility. The discussion centered around whether JSONCanvas could be evolved without breaking backwards compatibility with a loose consensus emerging that a more extensible spec wouldrequ breaking changes to JSONCanvas 1.0
5. Ideal Spec Development: There was interest in developing speculative, start-from-scratch specs for different tools (e.g. Excalidraw), not as definitive standards, but as a means to explore possible paths towards interoperability.

Projects
These are time-bound commitments to a specific deliverable that someone volunteered to take on.

A few folks agreed to map out an "ideal format" for saving a program's canvas. Sort of like imagining a JSON Canvas 2.0 based on the needs of their particular canvas.

• TLDraw - Orion
• Excalidraw - Christopher. View the results.
• Zwibbler - Steve. View the results.

Jess and Orion will work on combining these "ideal formats" into a single artifact to aid in the comparison of tools and the development of an open and extensible standard.

Jess from DXOS is working on implementing TLDraw to .canvas file export in Composer.

Discussions
Some discussions were started in the OCWG GitHub org:

• meta | OCWG Comparison Table
• excalidraw | File format discussions
• zwibbler | Properties and node types

The next meeting is currently scheduled for the week of April 8th.

[kepano]

Thanks for putting this together, including the summary and recording. The next steps look good to me.