Need to request transition to CR this month for WebDriver

We need to request transition to Candidate Recommendation this month for
the WebDriver spec.

Our plan of record requires we start CR this month in order to reach
Recommendation with the spec before our charter expires at the end of March:

  https://www.w3.org/2016/05/browser-testing-tools-charter.html

I have committed to Philippe to set aside enough of my time now and over the
following two months to deal with the W3C process steps needed to get us to CR
with the spec, and to get us out of CR and finally to Recommendation.

I think with Philippe’s support I could also get us one last extremely short
charter extension if needed in the case that we time out before we’re able to
actually get the Recommendation published.

The process steps require a couple of mandatory periods of several weeks each,
so it’s possible (maybe probable) that we will not be able to get through
all of them in enough time even if we do transition to CR this month.

So if we do end up needing it, I think I could get us some very short additional
time as an extension to our charter—a few additional weeks at most, not months.

But I also need to note here that after we do get this work completed, I do not
anticipate we can demonstrate there’s enough momentum to recharter the group for
future work—not enough for me to convince W3C management and the W3C Advisory
Committee it justifies the costs of (re)chartering a formal W3C Working Group.

So for April and beyond we need to also plan to have by then transitioned the
effort-going-forward to a W3C Community Group—where future work on WebDriver can
be incubated—and then later, when we eventually have enough it’s clear there’s a
need for getting that new (or newly matured and actually implemented) stuff
fully standardized, then at that point we could spin up a Working Group again.

So I can also help with getting that Community Group spun up in the next months.

But for now the gist of it is that if we care about getting WebDriver to
Recommendation, then we need to make as productive use of our time over the next
12 weeks as we’re able to—to focus on completing the current work of the Working
Group, and tie and ribbon on the spec and declare victory as far as having
navigated the current spec through the W3C process successfully.

  —Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith https://people.w3.org/mike