Privacy CG draft charter

Colleagues,

There is some interesting privacy specification work afoot, most of 
which is not quite ready to be in a WG.  Attendees at TPAC agreed to 
incubate that work in a new Privacy Community Group (CG).  The Privacy 
Interest Group (PING) will continue to handle horizontal review and 
general guidance docs, such as the threat model doc it just adopted and 
the questionnaire that was updated in collaboration with the TAG earlier 
this year.

Below is a proposed charter for the new CG.  Discussions about chairs 
for the CG are still in progress - I hope we will wrap those up in the 
next few days.  In the meantime, I invite discussion on the charter.


"The mission of the Privacy Community Group is to improve user privacy 
on the web. This community group will incubate the next set of 
privacy-focused web standards to improve browser behavior for user 
privacy. This group coordinates closely with the Privacy Interest Group 
(PING); it is expected that high-level privacy concepts, threat models, 
etc., developed in the Privacy Interest Group will be incorporated into 
the technical standards produced in this community group. Initial 
participants will include multiple browser vendors, privacy advocates, 
web application developers, and other interested parties. This group's 
work will be done primarily in GitHub."  [Thanks to Jatinder Mann for 
this draft.]

As in the draft charter, I expect the CG and PING to work in close 
cooperation.  There was some discussion of what tooling, if any, to 
share with PING.  I suspect the answers will be: separate GitHub repos, 
separate mailing list, and same Slack instance (if the CG wants to use 
Slack at all).  I trust the CG chairs to sort that out.

Some have observed that incubation is still (also) in scope for PING, 
per the draft charter that went out for AC review in June.  My 
preference and recommendation is to not change the PING charter at this 
time.  We all understand the new split of work proposed above, and there 
is no harm from leaving incubation in scope for PING.  PING's new 
charter has already been delayed by other things, and I don't want to 
further delay it.  Assuming all goes as planned, we can clean this up 
the next time we revise the PING charter.  And if this CG were to 
somehow not be the right thing, incubation at least has a fallback home 
in PING.

Lastly, if anyone has a slick name for the new CG that results in a 
usable and pronouncable acronym and might help newcomers understand the 
differences between PING and the CG, I would love the suggestion. 
"Privacy CG" doesn't capture much, and "Privacy Incubation CG" doesn't 
have a good acronym.  (I think renaming of PING might also be in scope, 
so feel free to be creative.)

-- Sam Weiler, W3C/MIT

Received on Friday, 27 September 2019 12:49:22 UTC