Aug 30 deadline for review of updates to WoT WG charter

Dear WoT IG

The W3C Management team appointed several reviewers for the draft Web of Things Working Group charter as part of the regular process for new charters.  The feedback from the reviewers included a request to split off the introduction to a white paper that can be provided to the Advisory Committee as an accompanying document.

Please review both documents linked below, and provide any feedback you have. We have a deadline of the end of Tuesday, August 30 (AoE). If we have resolved all outstanding points by that time, then the W3C Staff contacts will ask W3M to approve the charter for initiating the Advisory Committee Review on their next call, which is Wednesday, August 31. Otherwise, the AC Review will be delayed.

The feedback from W3M also covered the following points:


-        To avoid requiring the use of RDF in the wording of the charter in order to make the charter acceptable to people from a Web developer background that have reservations about RDF itself. There is no technical change to the current practices, though, and we still leave the Working Group to make the technical choices.

-        To replace the current mission statement with one that describes the challenge, the broad basis of the solution, but which avoids ambitious claims about what this Working Group charter is setting out to achieve.

-        To use the white paper to explain and justify the incubation work done by the Interest Group on the building blocks as part of the plugfests.  This follows from recent AC Reviews of charters where there has been consistent requests for work to be incubated before being brought forward into Working Groups. Matthias is working on drafting the content for this part of the white paper and looks for your help in ensuring that we have an accurate and up to date account.

-        To list candidates for co-chairing the Working Group. The W3C Management team has the responsibility for appointing chairs, but welcome input from the members of the Interest Group. If you have a suggestion for a co-chair please inform the WoT IG staff contacts and provide some background information to support your suggestion.

To address this feedback, Matthias has updated the charter accordingly and Dave has drafted the white paper (which, at the time of writing this mail, still misses content on the PlugFests):


-        In the charter draft, the mentioning of RDF specific solution was replaced with wording about common vocabularies that shall be compatible with existing work. The mission statement no longer contains visionary text on open markets and the network effect, but highlights that the work items were identified as mature by the IG.

-        The introduction is now very short, highlights the goal of complementing existing standards to enable cross-platform and cross-domain interoperability, as opposed to creating yet another IoT standard, and points to the Current Practices document to show incubation of the work.

-        The purpose of the white paper is to set out the vision for the Web of Things and the respective roles of the Interest and Working Group. The Working Group charter needs to be specific about what work items are deemed ready for progression along the W3C Recommendation track. This is to minimize the chance of people mistakenly thinking we are trying to do more than we are, and rejecting the charter as overly ambitious.

-        The scope summery bullet points were aligned with the sub-sections, deliverables, and pitches when summarizing our plan to non-members.

The draft Working Group charter is on GitHub at:

          https://w3c.github.io/wot/charters/wot-wg-2016.html

The draft white paper is at:

          http://www.w3.org/2016/08/wot-white-paper/

Your feedback is welcome on the WoT IG public or member mailing list. Ideally, you open an Issue on GitHub and label it with the orange "WG Charter":

            https://github.com/w3c/wot/issues/new

Many thanks,
Dave and Matthias