Editorial Assistants

Hello Working Group,

The Chairs have been in discussion amongst ourselves and with Ian Hickson (editor of our most complex spec and a few others) about ways to ease the burden on editors, to help achieve a reasonable schedule.

The idea we have come up with is what I'll call, for lack of a better term, Editorial Assistants. In our forthcoming revised Decision Policy[1] we described how different bug resolutions should be used. A few resolutions can be set by anyone, but FIXED, NEEDSINFO, WONTFIX and LATER could only be set by the Editor, with a rationale. Editorial Assistants would work with the Editor of a spec and would be empowered to set NEEDSINFO, WONTFIX and LATER resolutions with appropriate rationale. If we can get a good set of assistants, this should significantly benefit the schedule, since these three resolutions are the most likely to lead to reopening and escalation. Editorial assistants would also be encouraged to resolve WORKSFORME, INVALID and DUPLICATE bugs (which anyone can do), and to adjust bug priorities based on their own judgment and requests from the Working Group. Actual drafting of spec text (and therefore FIXED resolutions) would be left up to the Editor.

If you are interested in performing this role for the drafts edited by Ian Hickson (HTML5, HTML Canvas 2D Context, HTML Microdata), please privately contact Ian or the Chairs. The Chairs will only appoint candidates that can work well with Ian (as judged by him) and that in our judgment will handle these powers responsibly. The Chairs and Ian may also be contacting some people directly.

Also, if any other editors of Working Group drafts are interested in Editorial Assistants or even full-fledged Co-Editors, please contact the Chairs and we will let you know.

Regards,
Maciej

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy-v2.html

Received on Thursday, 16 June 2011 03:12:10 UTC