Re: Chair Elections and Community Group Draft

I'm sorry to be blunt, but the expectation that the meeting facilitator
will post the meeting notes and share resolutions for CFC isn't working.

This thread started with an objection from Ben Goering for a change that
took place almost a year ago.

We have to do a better job collectively of looping in our colleagues and
collaborators who operate asynchronously. It's in our charter and part of
our decision-making process.

Evan



On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 1:51 AM Emelia S. <emelia@brandedcode.com> wrote:

> > 1. Develop a cultural norm of selecting someone to post the meeting
> notes, and someone to start CFCs, in each CG meeting. If we can find
> volunteers to scribe every month, we can find someone to do these tasks.
> "Can I get a volunteer to post the meeting notes? Can I get a volunteer to
> start the CFC thread(s) for the resolutions?"
>
> The cultural norm here is: meeting coordinator / host publishes the
> meeting notes.
>
> You host a meeting, you publish the meeting notes. Part of hosting a
> meeting should be adding action items in the notes such that something
> needs CfC, these a task to actually do it.
>
> The Activity Summary Bot that does the summary emails of github activity
> on the mailing list could actually also listen for issues / PRs labeled as
> "needs-cfc" and automatically send those to the mailing list. It would
> require a little bit of work from me to setup the service as a webhook, but
> it is technically possible.
>
> For the WG, the W3C has a webhook for the same software as the activity
> summary bot that can automatically send certain emails. You just need to
> request the setup from W3C.
>
> — Emelia
>
> On 17 Jan 2026, at 00:37, Evan Prodromou <evanp@socialwebfoundation.org>
> wrote:
>
> This review jibes with my read of the situation. Thanks so much for the
> details, Darius.
>
> I also agree with Ben that we all have more work to do to make this group
> more fair and equitable, especially for asynchronous participation.
>
> I'm pretty lackadaisical about process issues like getting the CG meeting
> notes posted on GitHub, or getting our resolutions shared out to the
> mailing list as CFCs. These are required as part of our process, not
> optional. I get very caught up in the substance of our discussions, and I
> forget that skipping these steps undermines the legitimacy of our work.
>
> It seems easy to just leave these up to the Chair, but that's not fair,
> either. We have *one* active chair for this group, which has gotten much
> bigger and more complex than it was in previous years, when it used to have
> 2 or 3 Chairs. The least we can do is make his work easier by sharing some
> of these basic tasks which benefit us all.
>
> I think we have a couple of ways to improve this situation:
>
>    1. Develop a cultural norm of selecting someone to post the meeting
>    notes, and someone to start CFCs, in each CG meeting. If we can find
>    volunteers to scribe every month, we can find someone to do these tasks.
>    "Can I get a volunteer to post the meeting notes? Can I get a volunteer to
>    start the CFC thread(s) for the resolutions?"
>    2. Hold elections for three Chairs as soon as possible. I started this
>    thread with saying that we should finish the Charter formatting work first
>    so it doesn't look like a dog's breakfast every time we're asking someone
>    to refer to the Charter during an election, but I can definitely live with
>    doing it in parallel or even after an election, if that's where the rest of
>    the group is headed.
>
> I disagree with Ben that we should leave this all up to the W3C staff to
> enforce. That may be true formally, but I think the members of this CG have
> the ability to step up to the level of self-governance laid out in our
> Charter. The practice of small-scale democracy (electing leaders, making
> group decisions, following rules, changing rules) is a muscle that not all
> of us are used to exercising in our daily lives, but I believe in us and I
> think we can figure it out.
>
> Evan
>
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 8:40 PM Darius Kazemi <darius.kazemi@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> (Sorry, the url I included in 1b in the above message was a copy paste
>> error, as it's the URL to the discussion I refer to in 3a. 1b should read
>> simply, "Notably, this version of the charter does reference chair
>> elections quite clearly."
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 5:34 PM Darius Kazemi <darius.kazemi@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Just so I'm clear on what is being discussed, here's my understanding of
>>> the situation:
>>>
>>> 1) On Feb 7 we had a CG meeting. These are the minutes:
>>> https://github.com/swicg/meetings/tree/main/2025-02-07
>>> 1a) We passed this version of the charter:
>>> https://swicg.github.io/potential-charters/CGCharter-1727386911.html "
>>> with the understanding that PRs and conversation on it can continue.
>>> PENDING async resolution of the objection from Angelo"
>>> 1b) Notably, this version of the charter does reference chair elections
>>> quite clearly:
>>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0024.html
>>> 1c)  During the meeting an objection to be resolved in parallel was
>>> brought up by Angelo Gladding. The objection was related to our adoption of
>>> an unusual-for-W3C clause that "no 2 [participants] from the same
>>> organisation" can call for an election. I believe this clause came from
>>> seeing the boilerplate W3C rules misused in another group causing undue
>>> influence by an organization with multiple people who were participants,
>>> and members who proposed the additions of the clause wanted to avoid that
>>> happening. The objector wanted us to use W3C boilerplate.
>>>
>>> 2) The 14-day CFC went out that day. Reference:
>>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0026.html
>>>
>>> 3) On Feb 21, the CFC cleared and the charter was resolved.
>>> 3a) We had a brief discussion but the objector did not weigh in and as
>>> far as I remember and can see, consensus was to keep the charter I link in
>>> 1a above (discussion:
>>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0024.html)
>>>
>>> 4) Today, Evan opened this PR after some discussion with Ben on the
>>> fediverse: https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/pull/90
>>> 4a) As far as I can tell, the PR is strictly editorial. It removes the
>>> big yellow block in the charter I link in 1a above that says "Since the CG
>>> is starting with a bare-bones W3C CG charter boilerplate with regards to
>>> the Chair Selection process, the CG will not hold chair elections until the
>>> selection process is further specified and clarified." To be honest I am
>>> not even sure what that text means, or meant at the time, since we were not
>>> even using bare-bones W3C CG charter boilerplate with regards to chair
>>> selection! Perhaps it was left over from an earlier draft? I truly don't
>>> know.
>>> 4b) Evan started this email thread saying he wants a chair election for
>>> the CG
>>> 4c) Ben objects "to changing the charter to have a clause that we will
>>> not have chair elections"
>>>
>>> To point 4c there... I do not see anywhere that the charter Evan is
>>> proposing we move ahead with, the one that we adopted after a proposal and
>>> CFC process in February, would remove elections. You can see right here
>>> that the version of the charter with Evan's edits in the PR I reference in
>>> (4) above contains explicit Chair election instructions:
>>>
>>>
>>> https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/blob/3b8be926c132986a6f1179c31a14913718be37e3/CGCharter-1727386911.html#L284-L319
>>>
>>> So like... what are we even arguing about here???
>>>
>>> -Darius
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 3:43 PM Benjamin Goering <ben@bengo.co> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I object to changing the charter to have a clause that we will not have
>>>> chair elections, which was not in the charter passing CFC Feb 21, 2025.
>>>>
>>>> As soon as that charter passed, there should have been a legitimate
>>>> chair selected to oversee future consensus. Everyone was in a froth to make
>>>> a working group and railroaded it through without any due process. As the
>>>> charter says (because it is the norm in w3c CGs and in the charter
>>>> template), any resolutions from meetings are only considered pending until
>>>> they go to CFC on the mailing list. It's not the chair's (or lack thereof)
>>>> job to do this, it's whoever wants the resolution to be a CG decision, or a
>>>> collective responsibility.
>>>>
>>>> Personally it has been clear to me since last Summer there is no point
>>>> in formally objecting to a WG, and no point in expecting W3C to follow due
>>>> process over its own private internal strategy.
>>>>
>>>> But I will formally object to rewriting the CG charter post CFC to
>>>> somehow pretend we didn't all spend 6 months working on a CG charter that
>>>> said an elected chair will be determining consensus going forward.
>>>>
>>>> It is an extreme negligence that no one is following due process, and
>>>> ultimately that is the responsibility of W3C Staff and the W3C Board.
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 3:27 PM Evan Prodromou <
>>>> evanp@socialwebfoundation.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Ben Goering pointed out today on the Fediverse that we've had a
>>>>> charter for almost a year, and we haven't yet had an election for Chairs.
>>>>>
>>>>> I wanted to suggest that we start that process. However, when I went
>>>>> to look at our charter, it still had a lot of warnings and boilerplate and
>>>>> "DRAFT" markers.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think our next step is to update our charter to look like it's
>>>>> really been accepted. To do this, I added a PR to the potential-charters
>>>>> repo:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/pull/90
>>>>>
>>>>> I think for this kind of change we can just do a regular consensus
>>>>> decision process; *"The group may make simple corrections to the
>>>>> charter such as deliverable dates by the simpler group decision process
>>>>> rather than this charter amendment process."*
>>>>>
>>>>> I think that requires a CFC process. Can we get this going, and then
>>>>> start chair elections?
>>>>>
>>>>> Evan
>>>>>
>>>>
>