[wbs] response to 'Call for Review: Web Machine Learning Working Group Charter'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Call for Review:
Web Machine Learning Working Group Charter' (Advisory Committee) for Mozilla
Foundation by Tantek Çelik.


The reviewer's organization does not support this Charter for the reasons
cited in comments but is not raising a Formal Objection.

Additional comments about the proposal:
   The proposed charter and WG are problematic for a number of reasons as
noted by other responders.

We agree with the concerns raised by Microsoft, Google, and the Wikimedia
Foundation.

In addition we have the following summary concerns:

1. Lack of multi-engine interest, which in our opinion means there won't be
any meaningful (i.e. multi-implementer interop) effort at standardization,
and thus it doesn't belong on a standards track in a working group. All but
one of the interests in "experimental implementations" appear to be as
clients of the API(s), not actual implementations.

2. Solving low-level APIs when high-level use-cases should be solved first.
Providing only (or focusing on) low-level APIs forces web developers to do
a lot of redundant work to solve actual use-cases. The WebML CG's report
already identifies a handful of high level use-cases that ought to be
explored first as API candidates (in the CG), with the caveat that concerns
about privacy & bias indicated by other respondents are documented up front
and taken into consideration in the design of any solution.

It's not clear there are any sets of changes that would fix this charter to
make it reasonable for a WG to exist, and instead the charter ought to be
withdrawn, and work items sent back to the CG for further incubation, until
2+ implementers of the API itself clearly state at least experimental
implementation interest.

We are not formally objecting (per "opposes this Charter and requests that
this group not be created [Formal Objection]") because we do not believe
there is any chance the team would actually withhold creation of a working
group for these reasons.


Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/webml-charter/ until 2021-03-26.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Saturday, 27 March 2021 02:31:15 UTC