Fw: WG Outlook

>From what I can tell some people have already been made aware of the 
situation the WG is facing. Just so that everybody is on the same page, 
let me forward here the email I sent to the WG last Friday. See below.

As I was saying in a previous email, there is no doubts that something 
like SHACL is needed. This was agreed upon at the workshop we held 3 years 
ago and this has obviously not changed. So, I understand people feel 
distressed by the likelihood of not seeing SHACL become a Recommendation 
soon.

Believe me, as a person who put a lot of time in trying to help this 
community find a way forward I'm just as disappointed as anyone else could 
be. But this is no reason to start a pissing match and blaming contest so 
I would appreciate if everybody kept their cool.

The reality is that we started with several competing approaches, several 
of which were pushed aside for one reason or another,  alienating a 
significant part of the WG in the process. The remaining community focused 
on trying to turn SHACL into a Recommendation but that remaining group 
alone is very divided and *several* people feel like the current draft 
falls short of what they expect from a W3C Recommendation.

The W3C membership has been pushing for the W3C to only engage in 
standardizing proven technologies. This may just have been too early to 
try this here. Moving to CGs will give more freedom for experiments and 
time for maturation.
--
Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Web & Blockchain 
Technologies - IBM Cloud

----- Forwarded by Arnaud Le Hors/Cupertino/IBM on 12/12/2016 07:55 PM 
-----

From:   Arnaud Le Hors/Cupertino/IBM@IBMUS
To:     public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org
Date:   12/09/2016 10:33 PM
Subject:        WG Outlook



Hi all,

The question of our timeline and whether we could still deliver a 
Recommendation in the remaining time under the current charter has been 
raised and discussed a few times. I recently took the action to check with 
the W3C Management (W3M) and I want to share with you all what I learned.

Unfortunately my doubts about the possibility of getting our WG extended 
were confirmed. The W3C Advisory Board (AB) and membership in general has 
requested that W3M no longer just extend WGs on their own accord but 
instead submit WG extensions to the Advisory Committee (AC) - full 
membership - for review, just like when a WG is initially launched. This 
is a heavy process which requires explaining how a few additional months 
will make a difference and without a vibrant set of members supporting the 
request this isn't going to happen. So, the bottom line is that we cannot 
count on an extension.

With that in mind, and given that our current charter expires on June 1st, 
2017, that it takes 8 weeks to go from PR to REC, plus a minimum of 6 
weeks for CR, we're facing the following deadlines:

REC by June
PR by April
CR by February

Needless to say that this is extremely tight given the upcoming holidays. 
We ought to be realistic about the situation and our capacity to reach 
that goal. I must admit not to be optimistic given that 1) we keep getting 
new issues, 2) this leaves us no room for dealing with any other issues 
raised during CR - which would require publishing another CR -, 3) we are 
facing a diminishing level of participation.

Now, while we could continue on our current track, to try and increase our 
chances I would like to offer the following course of actions:
- put the idea of working on a friendly syntax to rest for good (this 
unfortunately means we no longer focus on trying to align with ShEx either 
and the ShEx community will need to find a different venue to standardize 
their work)
- separate SHACL Core from the SPARQL extension and focus only on Core.
- try to get Core to CR by the end of January and publish the SPARQL 
extension as a WG Note.

Either way, if we fail to get to CR by the end of January, W3M will direct 
us to publish everything as WG Notes and move the work to a Community 
Group where it can continue. Community Groups are much lighter weight, do 
not require approval from the AC or W3M. Once the work has gained enough 
maturity it can be resubmitted to W3C for standardization on the REC 
track.

I know this is not what anyone of us wanted but this is where we are. We 
can talk about this on Wednesday's call.
--
Arnaud  Le Hors - Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Web & Blockchain 
Technologies - IBM Cloud