Next steps

Greetings. We have some new WG members, and a few people who missed some important points on the call today. I want to do a quick summary here so we do not need to introduce W3C again at the Santa Clara meeting. If you missed today's call, you might read the bulleted points and skim the rest. If you are up-to-date, you might skim it all.

	- Reminder: daily rates for the Santa Clara meeting go up at the end of this week. Please register as soon as you can. We also want to ensure we have a large enough conference room allocated.

	- We will have strawman drafts for the Tracking Protection Expression recommendation and the Definitions and Compliance recommendation at the end of this week. These documents are the first words the editors put in print. We have a lot of placeholders and parts where open issues are called out, plus sections where several alternatives are mentioned.

	- Our next step as a group is to carefully review the strawman documents and see if there are any portions that are deal breakers for any of us. For example, that might look like "In the section about XYZ, you outline two options, but there is a third option that is important to consider." It will not look like trying to resolve those two options or trying to come to agreement about the open issues. We are working to get a rough structure that we will then fully specify over time. This draft does not preclude adding new issues, which will continue to happen over the next few months. 

	- Once we have worked through all blocking issues and revised the strawman documents, we will publish our First Public Working Draft (FPWD), which is our first milestone in the group's charter. If we are able to get there from discussion on the mailing list and by phone, great. If not, we will take a small bit of time of the first day in Santa Clara to make sure we have consensus on the FPWD. 

	- Note that only two of our three chartered deliverables are mentioned above. Tracking Selection Lists (TPLs) are de-coupled from this timeline, which is allowed by charter. We have an editor and potential co-editor lined up, several participants interested in seeing us move forward to a standard, and several against. We will reach a group decision at the Santa Clara meeting. 

For those new to this working group and to W3C in general, you will find a wealth of information on the TPWG website (http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection) including links to the group's Charter, the issues we have currently recorded, and actions that members have committed to doing. The mailing list is also available as a public archive, plus minutes from all calls and meetings.

Our goal is to create documents with standards recommendations. No company is legally compelled to abide by these recommendations, but we set out what they {must, should, may, must not} do in order to comply with the recommendations. We started out with a wide collection of issues to address, as raised in the first meeting in Boston. Over time, we have started to talk through those issues to find where we agree and disagree, as well as multiple proposals for how we might choose to address those issues. 

W3C is a consensus-driven process. We rarely vote, though straw polls to understand where members stand are an informal and useful tool. We work together as a group to come to a decision that as many people can live with as possible.  

When we reach consensus on an issue, we record that, along with any remaining dissent. That consensus is then folded into the recommendation document. We start with a giant pile of issues, work our way through them, and funnel down into an increasingly smaller list of remaining topics. Sometimes new issues come up along the way. Sometimes resolving an issue means revisiting a prior closed issue and rethinking. But in general, once an issue is resolved it is closed unless something new comes up. And in general, the trend line is a decreasing number of raised issues over time.

	Aleecia

Received on Wednesday, 19 October 2011 21:58:22 UTC