Re: WG comments, Working Drafts, and Last Call -- clarification please?

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:27 -0500, Shelley Powers wrote:
> I followed the teleconference in IRC archives. A lot of stuff.

Take it with a grain of salt; the IRC log misses a lot.

I think this is in response to a comment I made; I'll leave
the other question to others.

> Is it true that the Working Group can't comment during Last Call? That
> we have to raise issues before then?

Last call is a decision that the WG is done with all the issues
it knows about. So it's out of order for a WG member to
be party to a decision that we've addressed all our issues
and then turn around and send last call comments.


There's an exception: if a WG member genuinely discovers new
information after last call, it's in order to comment
on that.

Note that being party to a decision doesn't necessarily mean
supporting it; even those who disagree or abstain or
formally object to a decision are party to it, given
buy-in to W3C process which gives the chair
responsibility see that people get to make
their case and to decide when the search for consensus has
reached diminishing returns and bring an issue to a close
despite outstanding dissent.

http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#Consensus

> If this is true, is Last Call still on schedule for October? Do we
> know when in October?

We can only go to last call in October if we close issues
a lot faster than we have been.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Thursday, 6 August 2009 18:31:14 UTC