RE: Process for working on the CEPC

Hi Nigel, all,

+1 to many issues that Nigel identified regarding the process.
However, I also would like to point out that many of the procedural issue we are facing is the direct result of the way how the new draft of CEPC was created; in particular, attempting to edit the old text to preserve continuity between new and old documents. As a result, I can easily see why certain editorial steps we made can be a source for confusion.

E.g. when we agreed that the new document should clearly say what the unacceptable and expected behaviors are, we added two new headings and populated one of them ("Unacceptable behavior") with the new language. This lead to shifting the old CEPC text under "Expected behavior" which made things messy because we are now technically 'editing' the old text when, in fact, many parts of it have already been addressed, and new edits (deletion of the old text and new language added in that same place) aren't directly related. The person doing editing work [who has a complete view of the new document] may have a clear understanding of what each new pull request is going to accomplish, but for the rest of the task force members this process is not transparent and may not be easy to follow. To fix this issue going forward - a simple solution may be to just publish the complete existing text as a new draft, review it on its face value against the old CEPC text [to make sure that we didn't inadvertently lost any important part], and then make a new round of reviews and edits where pull requests are directly related to issues raised and discussed, as Nigel suggested.

Regards,
Vladimir

From: Nigel Megitt <nigel.megitt@bbc.co.uk>
Sent: Thursday, July 4, 2019 10:39 AM
To: public-pwe@w3.org
Subject: Process for working on the CEPC

Hi all,

Do we have any process set out for how we work together on the CEPC?

The approach up until now hasn't matched anything I've used before and I find it somewhat unsettling and hard to follow, which in turn makes me nervous that we are not doing the best work that we can, together. Specifically:

  *   Pull requests are opened to make changes that do not seem to have been discussed and do not have related issues
  *   Discussions on the pull requests are wide ranging in scope and hard to keep track of, very likely because they do not relate to discussed issues
  *   Pull requests are merged while there are still ongoing conversations, and I'm not sure when we have reached consensus or what the accepted review period is
  *   I haven't managed to work out what the publication plan is and if there are any particular timescales we're aiming to meet, target versions etc
  *   I'm unclear which issues are considered the highest priority amongst the task force membership
  *   Some issues in the repository are labelled CEPC but others probably do relate to the CEPC and are not labelled
I may be on my own here, in which case fine, carry on, but in case I'm not, does anyone else here have similar problems following the group's work? If so, can we fix them, maybe by introducing a general process that the group uses in the absence of some exceptional circumstance, and writing some guidance? Maybe there is an existing description of the group's working approach - please point me to it if there is!

Nigel