IG Recharter discussion this week

Dear IG group members,

Based on the discussions this week it seems that we have not managed so far to draft the IG group recharter by consensus this time. However that is not due to the technical topics addressed but due to

-       the way the charter was rewritten several times and

-       individual interests reflected by dedicated phrasing.

To my understanding we have consensus

a)     how the IG should complement the planned WG activities and

b)    that the scope should cover beside others the following three aspects

-       Semantic interoperability, models and APIs

-       Continue work on Security and Privacy (to my understanding E2E security across IoT platforms is too narrow and not the only concern we have to tackle)

-       Approaches for decentralized IoT architectures

>From what I read we do not have consensus in the following points. So let's see what can be a reasonable way forward.

-       Already fixing additional deliverables for the semantic models and the security in the charter. Concerns have been raised based on the experience of the last charter where it turned out that we had to change deliverable definitions or even some deliverables were no longer in scope.

Proposed way forward: structure the scope in two parts, the one preparing and complementing the initial WG and the second part working on new areas (see e.g. second paragraph in the scope section). This structure then is also reasonable to use in the deliverables section, i.e. list in the first part the four already drafted deliverables. In the second part then refer to the topics discussed as new areas in the scope and that contributors will decide whether to issue a new revision of the existing deliverables or create a new deliverable on the specific topic.

-       Providing solutions in the charter: this refers to the discussion on the decentralized IoT approach. At least in the discovery we came across this topic last year and after review decided that this is so far mentioned in scientific papers but not yet mature enough to be evaluated. Now it seems that we agree to take a closer look into what is needed for this approach.

Proposed way forward: describe the requirements and characteristic of what is understood and needs to be discussed by a decentralized IoT approach but avoid already putting forward solutions.

Actively contributing members and moderating team contacts are crucial to achieve a reasonable IG recharter, especially because the timeframe is tight. But pushing these contributions forward should not be done at the cost of consensus. With that we lose active members and not attract more active members! So please step back and let's try to conclude on the raised points in a way which can be accepted in the group. We agreed in previous webconfs that the best tool currently at hand to track issues and discussions is Github. So for the remaining issues the current draft will be merged again into Github and finalize the draft.

The IG charter discussion in the last week was also dominated by the question how to increase the activity in the group and how to attract active members. As mentioned by others this will not only be achieved by particular sentences in the charter but by active members outreaching to relevant stakeholders and asking for their feedback. We have heard in the charter discussion a lot what is needed in the scope to be relevant to potential new contributing members. But do we have feedback of those on the discussed topics? How to make this transparent to the IG group members? How do we trigger this active discussion? Isn't this more important than a particular sentence we put in the scope?

So, with whom have we discussed the above mentioned three topics, or with whom are we planning to discuss those? How can the group support these discussions? Please comment how we as a group can act more consistently to outreach for stakeholders which we think are important for the group.

BR,
Joerg