Data on WG participation / activity / progress

[cross-posting to the Process CG and AC lists to encourage anyone interested to join the discussion in the public-success-fail@w3.org mailing list and the task force wiki https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB/2014-2015_Priorities/w3c_work_success<https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB/2014-2015_Priorities/w3c_work_success#Mining_the_.2FTR_page.2C_participation_lists.2C_mailing_lists.2C_and_issues_lists_for_patterns> .]



As you may recall, the AB has created a public task force to try to identify W3C work that is not on the road to success.


I have made some progress on the planned task to mine data to identify WGs who have had the least activity and progress in recent years.  There is now a table mashing up data from the working groups database, and the mailing list archive. See WG Data Mining<https://www.w3.org/wiki/WG_Data_Mining> for links to the data and a description of the fields in the table.

>From a simple analysis based on sorting the table by a) having an expired charter for multiple years, b) few messages in their mailing lists in the last half of 2014, c) few technical reports published 2013-2014, and zero CRs / PRs / Recommendations 2013-2015, the following WGs scored near the bottom on on multiple criteria:

  *   Web Notifications
  *   Forms
  *   Near Field Communications
  *   Voice Browser

See WG Data Mining Analysis<https://www.w3.org/wiki/WG_Data_Mining_Analysis> for more information.

Please contribute to the wiki and join the discussion. I have not done any qualitative research to investigate whether these WGs are actually on the road to failure, and some of this data collecting and analysis was done "by hand" and could have errors. Please consider joining the task force to help interpret/correct this data and analysis. I'm sure that more sophisticated data science could yield lots more interesting insights into the questions the task force is addressing, so feel free to contribute your expertise!