WG Outlook

Hi all,

The question of our timeline and whether we could still deliver a 
Recommendation in the remaining time under the current charter has been 
raised and discussed a few times. I recently took the action to check with 
the W3C Management (W3M) and I want to share with you all what I learned.

Unfortunately my doubts about the possibility of getting our WG extended 
were confirmed. The W3C Advisory Board (AB) and membership in general has 
requested that W3M no longer just extend WGs on their own accord but 
instead submit WG extensions to the Advisory Committee (AC) - full 
membership - for review, just like when a WG is initially launched. This 
is a heavy process which requires explaining how a few additional months 
will make a difference and without a vibrant set of members supporting the 
request this isn't going to happen. So, the bottom line is that we cannot 
count on an extension.

With that in mind, and given that our current charter expires on June 1st, 
2017, that it takes 8 weeks to go from PR to REC, plus a minimum of 6 
weeks for CR, we're facing the following deadlines:

REC by June
PR by April
CR by February

Needless to say that this is extremely tight given the upcoming holidays. 
We ought to be realistic about the situation and our capacity to reach 
that goal. I must admit not to be optimistic given that 1) we keep getting 
new issues, 2) this leaves us no room for dealing with any other issues 
raised during CR - which would require publishing another CR -, 3) we are 
facing a diminishing level of participation.

Now, while we could continue on our current track, to try and increase our 
chances I would like to offer the following course of actions:
- put the idea of working on a friendly syntax to rest for good (this 
unfortunately means we no longer focus on trying to align with ShEx either 
and the ShEx community will need to find a different venue to standardize 
their work)
- separate SHACL Core from the SPARQL extension and focus only on Core.
- try to get Core to CR by the end of January and publish the SPARQL 
extension as a WG Note.

Either way, if we fail to get to CR by the end of January, W3M will direct 
us to publish everything as WG Notes and move the work to a Community 
Group where it can continue. Community Groups are much lighter weight, do 
not require approval from the AC or W3M. Once the work has gained enough 
maturity it can be resubmitted to W3C for standardization on the REC 
track.

I know this is not what anyone of us wanted but this is where we are. We 
can talk about this on Wednesday's call.
--
Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Web & Blockchain 
Technologies - IBM Cloud