Re: Draft Charter

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008, Matt Womer wrote:
> 
> I'm happy to say that a draft of the Geolocation charter is now 
> available [1], [...] Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated, either 
> here on this list or to myself directly.
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2008/06/geolocation/charter/

Here's Google's feedback:

We don't think this should have a separate working group. We would rather 
see this done in the Web Apps working group. We feel quite strongly that 
this API should not have its own group.

If, and I stress "if", the W3C decides to go ahead and have a separate 
working group despite this, then we have the following comments on the 
proposed charter:

 - We think the first paragraph's emphasis on prviacy could mislead people 
   into thinking that the API should constrain how user agents expose the 
   privacy options to the user. We would like the charter to explicitly 
   allow the deliverables to defer the user interface aspects of privacy, 
   and the privacy model in general, to the user agents, within the 
   constraints required to obtain interoperability at the API level.

 - We think that the charter should not require the working group to 
   publish the requirements as an explicit WG note. It should be 
   acceptable for us to publish the requirements in the spec itself as an 
   appendix, or on a wiki, or on our WG home page, etc.

 - We believe the timetable to have an unrealistic estimate for the time 
   from CR to PR. Given the need to create a comprehensive test suite and 
   to obtain two complete implementations, we believe it would be more 
   realistic to expect the API specification to reach PR at the earliest 
   one year after it enters CR, rather than three months later as in the 
   current proposed charter. (This also affects the proposed end date.)

 - We do not like that the group is expected to have face to face meetings 
   and telecons. Our experience with other working groups in the past few 
   years suggests that the group should not be required to meet, and that 
   asynchronous communication media such as IRC and e-mail should be 
   sufficient.

 - We are not sure that the charter should explicitly expect the group to 
   follow the AWWW and CharMod specifications. Recent developments (in 
   particular in the HTML5 group) have suggested that these specifications 
   are somewhat unrealistic in terms of the constraints put on 
   technologies intended for wide deployment on the Web.

 - We do not believe there should be a member-only mailing list. A public 
   group should be exclusively public.

 - We believe that the decision policy should be ammended to explicitly 
   grant specification editors broad responsibility for the specifications 
   that they edit, requiring them to address the needs of anyone bringing 
   feedback to the group, as well as requiring them to base their 
   decisions on technical merit and research rather than on votes; we 
   think that that decisions should explicitly not be derived from 
   consensus. We think that the decision policy should say that the group 
   has the right to replace the editor based on a vote, so as to 
   safeguard against editors who fail in their responsibilities to the 
   group.

 - We think that participation should be open to anyone on the same basis 
   as the HTML working group.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson, on behalf of Google

Received on Friday, 20 June 2008 22:38:26 UTC