[wbs] response to 'Second Call for Review: Technology and Policy IG Charter'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Second Call for
Review: Technology and Policy IG Charter' (Advisory Committee) for
Vivliostyle Inc. by Florian Rivoal.


The reviewer's organization opposes this Charter and requests that this
group not be created [Formal Objection].

Additional comments about the proposal:
   I understand the desire to tackle the kind of discussions this IG is
chartered to work on, but I do not think it will be an effective venue to
handle such topics, and therefore I object to its creation.

I have two fundamental issues with this IG:

 - Since not every member company of the W3C will be a member of the IG, it
seems at first reasonable that it would only produce member-private Notes,
to be submitted to the AC or to the team for further review before being
use. At the same time, I believe that this almost ensures that the
discussion will happen twice (or be silenced without reaching consensus),
as there is no particular reason to believe the broader AC will agree with
the conclusions of the IG; policy topics are highly subjective, and there
is no reason to believe the membership of the IG would be a representative
sample of the AC.

 - Putting "The discussion of internal W3C policies" out of scope also
seems like a difficult thing to do. On the face of it, it seems like the
right thing, since not all W3C members are involved, but determining where
the limit is is likely to be fuzzy and controversial in itself, since
Notes-that-are-not-internal-policies can end up bing used as a reference to
justify proposals for internal policies. And as the output of the IG cannot
effectively be used for anything without going through the AC or the team
anyway, the boundary is far from clear.

I believe that both what has been put in scope for this IG, and the
internal policy discussions that have been left out of scope, belong to the
AC. I recognize that some topics can occasionally generate large and
unwieldy discussions, where feelings run high and fact based discussion is
lacking, but I do not think this IG would solve that. In such situations,
and on a case by case basis, it may be appropriate for the AC to mandate
some kind of task force to do fact research and present objective
conclusions on top of which the subjective policy discussion can resume in
a more firmly grounded way. Depending on the topic, the TAG may be the
right body to send this research work to, or an ad hoc task force may need
to be set up.


Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/techpolig2/ until 2016-09-21.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Friday, 2 September 2016 02:54:09 UTC