RE: w3process-ACTION-47: Produce a proposal for addressing wayne's "comment 9" - allowing appeal where the director's decision isn't the same as the proposal sent for review.

It's not worth our time to pursue a fix to a hypothetical corner case unless the fix is quick and obvious.  It's clear from the call yesterday and this continuing thread that there is no easy consensus on this topic, so let's close it.

If this scenario ever comes up, it's a symptom of far worse problems than some vague wording in the process document, and clarity in the process document will do little to solve those problems.

-----Original Message-----
From: chaals@yandex-team.ru [mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 9:19 AM
To: David Singer; Jeff Jaffe; Revising W3C Process Community Group
Cc: Wayne Carr
Subject: Re: w3process-ACTION-47: Produce a proposal for addressing wayne's "comment 9" - allowing appeal where the director's decision isn't the same as the proposal sent for review.

18.03.2015, 17:11, "David Singer" <singer@apple.com>:
>>  On Mar 17, 2015, at 17:20 , Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> wrote:
>>
>>  On 3/17/2015 6:36 PM, chaals@yandex-team.ru wrote:
>>>  + wayne.carr@
>>>  - sysbot+tracker@
>>>
>>>  I propose changing the second sentence of section 8.2 from
>>>  "When Advisory Committee review immediately precedes a decision, Advisory Committee representatives may only appeal when there is dissent."
>>>
>>>  to
>>>  "When there is dissent in an Advisory Committee review, or the director reaches a decision other than that proposed (including simply not doing what was proposed), Advisory Committee representatives may appeal the decision."
>>  I think I understand the theory by which some would like to have more of the Director's decisions available for appeal.
>>
>>  But before I (or someone else) takes this proposal to the Director, it would be useful to provide some actual use cases.
>>
>>  For example, if a WG proposed a transition and it was rejected by the Director, and the WG felt so wronged that they wanted to appeal this rejection, that would be a sample use case.  Can someone give several examples where that happened in the last five years?
>
> That would be useful.

Actually, if this were a common enough problem to make that feasible, I would suggest that we would already have very serious problems.

> Also (though I know the process is vague about this in most cases) — appeal to whom?  The scenario envisaged is that the WG and AC were of a like mind and recommended course A, and the Director decided on course B, correct?
>
> Presumably the Director was well aware of the WG and AC opinion and decided B anyway.  Would it not be rather superfluous for someone to say “we think you are wrong”, and appeal (presumably to the Director), when he made the decision knowing full well that the WG and AC disagree?

The director is unlikely (IMHO) to have a good standard for measuring the degree if disagreement across W3C as a whole. We hope this provision isn't exercised, but it provides a way for the message to be put by the AC that the director seriously misjudged, and should think hard about the decision again. Which is why an appeal process to the person who made the decision being appealed is actually a useful thing.

cheers

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Wednesday, 18 March 2015 17:23:08 UTC