Re: Invited expert - Change of policy?

On 7/4/09 02:54, Harry Halpin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 1:23 AM, Renato Iannella <renato@nicta.com.au
> <mailto:renato@nicta.com.au>> wrote:

>     Isn't this worse? Are you creating a two-class system?
 >
>     Those Members/Invited Experts who decide "consensus" and the "rest
>     of the participating public".?

One of the implicit duties that comes with being a full member is to try 
to reflect and respect the diversity of views found in the surrounding 
community. If we don't do so, the work won't succeeed. But not everyone 
has the time to participate fully. For those who do, we'll try to be 
generous with the Invited Expert mechanism.

>     It also creates an unclear IP regime as any "member of the public"
>     can make contributions (without agreeing to the W3C Patent Policy)
>     *and* without the need to make any disclosures?

Many W3C groups (even REC-track) have public feedback and discussion 
lists where text comes in from unknown and un-verified sources, yet gets 
treated seriously as technical commentary. Ultimately it is a judgement 
call: there is a spectrum ranging from "you typo'd in paragraph 3" to 
"here's my rewrite of the XML spec to have a recovery model and a 
prettier syntax".

>     The solution is simple: Everyone becomes an "Invited Expert" and
>     agrees to the XG Charter policy.
 >
> However, this would require everyone who participates in the public
> list-serv or who speaks at the telecon to sign up to be an Invited
> Expert first, and would require explicit banning of everyone who does
> not sign up as an Invited Expert from the list-serv. That sort of
> list-serv and telecon does not seem very public or open to me.

Yeah, I am hoping we will also have guest contributions, cross-posted 
mail threads, etc. We need to be as clear as we can which are 
discussions and which are technology contributions. It is impossible to 
be 100% airtight since any full XG member could casually relay the 
words/thoughts of another, then remember to credit them later. 
Attempting to solve this social problem through technical (list 
membership / crossposting) mechanisms doesn't seem to me to be very 
promising.

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Tuesday, 7 April 2009 07:32:55 UTC