Efforts towards creating a Working Group

Hello all,

I wanted to make it visible that we have a project of migrating from our
current Community Group (CG) to a W3C Working Group (WG). This is a more
officially W3C-endorsed structure which has the powers to publish
recommendations (i.e. sorts of standards). This would give more
visibility to the protocol, and probably foster its adoption on the long
run.

Creating a Working Group is a bit more involved than a Community Group.
The summary of what we need for this can be found as "todo" items in our
draft charter for the WG:
https://reconciliation-api.github.io/charter/working_group_charter.html

In particular, I draw your attention to the following points:

- we need some concrete time commitment from one or a few organizers for
the working group (which might require coordination with our respective
organizations - or even funding applications?). Typically, looking at
other working groups, there is a lead committing to some percentage of a
Full-Time Equivalent (sometimes as little as 0.01 FTE) and other members
committing to be active in discussions. Who would be motivated to play a
role in this?

- unlike a CG which can run indefinitely, a WG has a fixed term during
which it should produce its outcomes. We are also asked to come up with
a timeline of our deliverables and other milestones. Therefore, once he
WG starts we need to be relatively quick to publish our specs
officially. On my side, I am wondering at which stage of maturity for
the specs we want to be at, when migrating to a WG. In particular, I
opened a discussion some weeks ago about changing the API to make it
more compatible with REST principles: if we go ahead with this proposal,
I suspect it would be useful to have already written up (and ideally
adopted, in a few systems) such new specs before migrating to a WG. What
do you think?

- to move our specs to a "Proposed Recommendation", we need to
demonstrate a few implementations of it, so it could be useful to have
an idea of who could commit to implementing the latest specs on their
side (as a reconciliation service or client) as part of this effort.

Also, because we have many organizations represented in this group, I
wonder if this migration to a WG would be a good opportunity to apply
for some network funding for this. I have the feeling that we could be
quite convincing (with our activity as a CG so far, our many different
implementations), and it should be doable to work as a group since we
have relatively clear separations of responsibilities from the start
(each organization implements the API in its own context).

I am very interested to read what you think of all this!

Antonin

Received on Tuesday, 21 June 2022 11:47:43 UTC