Re: " W3C Culture" CG? RE: Problems I'd like to see addressed in Process 2016

On 4/24/2015 2:01 PM, Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) wrote:
> Thanks Charles, I had forgotten about http://w3.org/Guide .  I don’t 
> think what I have in mind is a CG to advise the staff on how to update 
> the Guide.  I was thinking more like a CG to crowdsource a "Guide for 
> a Revitalized W3C.

"Revitalization CG".  I like it much better than Process CG or Culture CG.

>   It might:
>
> -  Critically review the  written (in the Guide and Process Document) 
> and unwritten W3C policies and cultural norms to identify those that 
> really work in practice and those that haven’t aged well or don’t 
> align with modern industry and OSS practice.
> - Give open minded consideration to common critiques of W3C culture, 
> e.g. our regrettable tendency to “bikeshed all things” 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality>
> - Build a living document advising how to build royalty-free, truly 
> interoperable specifications with broad consensus in an efficient way. 
>  The document should  clearly distinguishes what is proven best 
> practice and what are promising ideas worth trying.
>
> The CG should “eat its own dogfood” as much as possible, operating by 
> the cultural principles it selects and using the tools that its 
> research finds most effective.   And if the CG finds itself 
> bikeshedding on some unimportant details of culture because they are 
> easier to grapple with than the problem it set out to solve, it should 
> put itself out of its misery!
>
> From: "chaals@yandex-team.ru <mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru>"
> Date: Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 4:24 PM
> To: Michael Champion, "jeff@w3.org <mailto:jeff@w3.org>", W3C Process 
> Community Group
> Subject: Re: " W3C Culture" CG? RE: Problems I'd like to see addressed 
> in Process 2016
>
>     23.04.2015, 06:48, "Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH)"
>     <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com
>     <mailto:Michael.Champion@microsoft.com>>:
>>
>>     > Do we need a "W3C culture" CG ?
>>
>>     I’m intrigued because I **almost** added to my message yesterday
>>     another point I’ve been hearing – One reason it takes so long to
>>     get things done at W3C is the reliance on email, which encourages
>>     conversations to wander and fragment rather than move toward a
>>     conclusion. Supposedly that’s one reason why people are
>>     gravitating toward GitHub – it has an integrated set of tools to
>>     raise issues, discuss them, record the resolution, and map the
>>     resolution back to a pull request implementing it.
>>
>>     BUT it only takes a bit of discipline and manual labor to do this
>>     with Bugzilla and email… so is the problem one of tooling or
>>     culture?  Or simply that many chairs don’t know the best practice
>>     for getting stuff done by discouraging people to wander off into
>>     the weeds when they’re trying to get a spec done?
>>
>     I think the latter is a problem we suffer from a lot.
>>
>>     To some extent the Process Document has been a collection of best
>>     practices advice as well as a document describing the rules by
>>     which WGs operate.  If that’s the case, then this culture / best
>>     practices discussion belongs in this CG, since it’s where a
>>     conclusion would be written down. But the sense of the AB and
>>     this CG over the last couple of hears has been to separate out
>>     the core rules of W3C process from the best practice guidelines,
>>     which implies they should be separate documents and CGs.
>>
>     There has "always" been the "Guide" - which is explicitly about
>     Best Practice and stuff instead of being the
>     rules.http://w3.org/Guide - but start at the bottom is my
>     suggestion for how to read it.
>>
>>     I’m neutral on whether to have the discussion in a new CG or this
>>     CG, but somebody needs to  be doing what Jeff suggested:
>>
>>     >          Identify best practices
>>
>>     >          Assess existing WGs and see where they are failing to implement these best practices
>>
>>     >          Be action oriented - in pushing WGs, their leadership, and the Team to implement these
>>     practices.
>>
>>     Thoughts?
>>
>     You can have discussions here where they are in scope, or in fora
>     like chairs@ <mailto:chairs@w3>, but you should check that if
>     there is an outcome someone is prepared to do some writing, and
>     someone can work with Coralie to get the writing / editing of the
>     existing Guide online.
>     cheers
>     chaals
>>
>     --
>     Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
>     chaals@yandex-team.ru <mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru> - - - Find
>     more at http://yandex.com
>