Shelley, I'm not sure how to respond. Right now part of the problem
is that it's like we're all scattered in a room shouting to be in
parts of conversations every where else in the room. It appears
confusing because it is confusing. The last time this happened in
1.0, we created an issues list[1] and focused on them to resolution.

Conversationally, it's worse this time because we're not in a room,
we're in a building, people running around rooms trying to catch and
participate in other bits of conversation -- across blogs and lists.

Politically, though, we're right in the same place where we were June
6, 2000 when Dave Winer presumed ownership of RSS[2,3], then vaguely
claimed he didn't, then continued to act in a manner of that
presumption as he does to this day. I'm not saying that the RSS 1.0
Working Group did any better by trying to do the same thing, but it
was a response, not an opening.

There is no open forum for registering and addressing issues that the
entire community can feel welcome in.

Then as now, the solution is focus and attention on specific issues.
To arrive at that solution it takes the community to agree that they
can. Even if the openly, rationally discussed resolutions to those
issues results in different flavors of XML for different purposes.

The community needs to agree that they can.

+1 on an open forum.

-- Ken

[1] http://rsswhys.weblogger.com/rss-1.0-issues
Note that first item was actually closed (adopted), but it was the
last issue to be resolved before 1.0 went golden, and we never
updated the issues list.
[2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/121
[3] http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backIssues/2000/06/06