RE: Missing op agreement warning

From: Wayne Carr [mailto:wayne.carr@linux.intel.com]

I'd prefer:
!WARNING! - This Community Group has not adopted a Charter. W3C recommends that CGs create a Charter that defines the group's scope, deliverables, schedule, and the decision making process. Without a Charter, participants may not understand the rules under which the Chair is operating the CG.

I think "Operational Agreement" should be replaced with "Charter" in the cg/bg process.  I think the term "Operational Agreement" is causing confusion.  Everyone knows what a group Charter is.  An operational agreement sounds more contractual, like it could require you have to sign some other contract to participate.
[Milan] I agree the lines of the CG Charter/Operational Agreement are blurred.  In a WG, these are one and the same.  I support anything to promote what was the operational agreement to be in the same class of importance as the charter.


more comments below ...

(I'm on vacation and likely would not see a response -- just waiting to finish up something and then I'm gone until January)
On 12/6/2012 11:08 AM, Young, Milan wrote:

In our last teleconference, I accepted an action item to produce a warning statement to be displayed in cases where the group has not adopted a "process guideline".  I am assuming this "process guideline" is meant to describe the "operational agreement" posted on [1].  Please find my draft below.



!WARNING! -  This group has not adopted an Operational Agreement as recommended by the W3C.  Participants are advised to proceed with caution because there are few native guarantees for <link>principled</link> behavior which would otherwise be in place for W3C-sponsered activities.   The only hard requirement is that the group stays within the bounds of the Charter.

The CG process [1] says: "A Community Group may adopt operational agreements (recorded, for example, in the form of a charter) that establish the group’s scope of work, decision-making processes, communications preferences, and other operations."  If they have a Charter, they have an Operational Agreement and this warning does not appear.  If "Charter" was being used here as a synonym for "Operational Agreement" it would probably be better to just use 1 term.  I'd prefer dropping "Operational Agreement" and the process calling it a "Charter".

I'm not comfortable with the "few native guarantees" wording.  I would hope if there is any egregious behavior, W3C staff would close down a CG.  I don't think we should give the impression that anything goes.

[Milan] I experienced a case where the CG chair made several material commitments to the group, and then later changed his “opinion”.  The chair was not willing to publically discuss what led him to change course.

W3M was not willing to call this egregious behavior, I disagree.  So unless we are willing to reevaluate, we need to be aggressive in our warning.






If you are uncomfortable with this arrangement, please contact the group's chair(s) and request an Operational Agreement.  Keep in mind that only agreements explicitly contained in the posted Operational Agreement will be enforced.  Commitments made on the mailing list, for example, are non-binding.

The Charter could say the CG is going to create a particular spec and the CG may discover there is no interested and not do it.  Or the Charter could say it would ultimately propose a WG and it could turn out there is no interest in that.  There isn't any general expectation that anything like that would be enforced.  it could be a sign with other information that there is a problem.  But, in and of itself, it isn't necessarily anything wrong.   I don't think we should imply W3C is going to be enforcing everything in a Charter.  I think it should be left vague exactly what the W3C can enforce, but it shouldn't imply it is everything.

In a WG where the requirements of a charter are clear. A WG can't go outside the scope presented in a charter.   They can't create specs that are out of scope.  If there are rules about how the group operates, they have to obey those rules.  That's the type of thing that would always be enforceable - because it's clearly something wrong if violated.  But there are other deliverable type things that groups aren't necessarily forced to actually do typically (though in some circumstances they could be - if a group was making no progress for instance)

[Milan] It seems this problem was created when you renamed Operational Agreement to Charter.  We do need a way of enforcing the rules committed to in the Operational Agreement are maintained.







Notes:

  * As best I could tell, the agreement language is a MAY.  In my statement above, I implied this would change to a SHOULD.

  * If a group does have an operational agreement, we should probably link to it.  But if they do not, I suggest  a warning similar to the above is displayed along-side the charter on the home page.

  * If a group publishes a document, the Operational Agreement should be linked as a sort of "signature" on the document.  If a group published a document that did not have an Operational Agreement in place at the time, that document should be stamped with a warning similar to the above.





[1] http://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/