Re: Webizen progress and next meeting

On Aug 5, 2014 5:44 AM, "Charles McCathie Nevile" <chaals@yandex-team.ru>
wrote:
>
> On Mon, 04 Aug 2014 18:52:03 +0200, Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com>
wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 4, 2014 12:29 PM, "Jeff Jaffe" <jeff@w3.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > Thanks to all who participated in last Friday's call.
>> >
>> > The Doodle poll for the next call is at [1].
>
> Regrets for the call.
>
>> [...]
>>
>> At the risk of sounding like a broken record, developers have no
first-class voice with regard to w3c matters, especially with regard to
direction in terms of TAG and AB  - at least for WGs we have possibility
for invited experts, but IEs have the same issue: while granted status for
WGs, they have no (even collective) representation. I understand that some
membership was opposed to this, but is it just off the table?  I don't see
anything in the survey even hinting at this.
>
>
> Some membership were indeed opposed, others (like me), were of the
opinion that webizens (imho, developers, IEs, and other non-member
interested parties) actually should have good, representative
representation. Already, chairs are able to participate in AC meetings, and
as well as being in some cases invited experts I find that they are often
reasonably good representatives of participants in their groups, but I
don't think this is enough.
>
> I'm not a huge overall fan of the webizen idea, since in most cases I
think it would be far better for developers who want representation to get
together and set up a non-profit that can join W3C.
>
This is what I was hoping we could avoid with Webizen.  The truth is that
setting up a nonprofit is non-trivial to do with any legitimacy, its a
legal entity and generally needs a board and treasurer and founding charter
and so on.  I've consulted with a lawyer friend who pointed out that since
their purpose is to represent, it's likely that this can be called into
question and that  for this to work we'd need to set up more than one.  If
we ran a big campaign to spin them up for every 100 developers or so there
then also seem to be possible affiliations which current w3c rules seem to
imply they could deny membership based on.  If you are an existing legal
entity, joining w3c is just "submit paperwork and pay the fee", and you
already have all this.  If you are creating a loose group without an
existing body the required effort is very significantly greater.  None of
this seems strictly necessary.

> For a group of 100 US-based developers, the cost would be in the order of
$75 and they get an AC rep, the right to nominate official partiipants to
groups, etc. - plus access to the material that is confidential to the
members. For a group based in a developing country there is an existing
mechanism to reduce the price to something locally appropriate. And W3C
already has the mechanisms and staffing in place to manage this so the
extra cost of maintaining it is close to zero.
>
> That said, one of my success criteria for a webizen project is that
invited experts participate. And one good reason for them to do so is that
they collectively get "direct" representation - i.e. to select among
themselves people who are interested in and capable of (primarily the issue
here is time and money) representing the interests of a constituency in the
way AC reps do for their sponsor organisations.
>
> I hope I will get to the wiki this week to try and push this idea a bit
further. If it doesn't happen today, please feel free to nag me by private
email or twitter until I have done so.
>
> PS: Brian (and anyone else not versed in the slightly arcane, but
incredibly useful, IRC tools): you should send a /msg to RRSagent:
> /msg RRSAgent help
> to learn more about what it does. In particular, it doesn't log /me
commands - this is a feature that allows people to make comments that are
available to those in the meeting but that do not form part of the record…
>
Yes, that's what I was saying.. I mentioned that calling in was an
impossibility via /me, it's not logged.

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