WDs and heartbeats

Hi TPWG,

Below is a brief summary of our Process obligations regarding publishing Working Drafts and a proposal for how we can do so this month. Of course, none of this determines or changes the consensus-building work on the substance before us, so I've tried to keep it brief.

Per the heartbeat rule in the Process, we must publish one new Working Draft snapshot of a technical report and should publish one for each technical report. (In exceptional cases, we can petition the Director to publish a short public status report instead.)

Last Working Drafts were published in September:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-tracking-compliance-20130912/
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-tracking-dnt-20130912/

Chairs expressed their intention to publish every two months, but there were some concerns about Process and WDs in October, so we delayed publication. Since then, we've made a couple of group decisions (mostly on definitions) and focused work on the TPE. Because the TPE Editors' Draft is in flux at the moment (undergoing rather substantial changes regarding Compliance and dependencies), we might choose not to publish a new Working Draft of that document until the group has had a chance to review and issues are opened, documented or resolved. A few definitions and updates have been made to Compliance, which I believe is stable enough to publish as a Working Draft, with a caveat to the public that the group's focus is currently on the TPE.

Proposed Status of this Document for Compliance WD (in addition to standard boilerplate about Process and about Working Draft status):

> 	*This draft does not constitute consensus and does not claim to indicate any preferred text of the group.*  Reviewers are advised to consult the list of issues tracked in the Compliance Current product and the wiki list of change proposals developed by participants in the Working Group. It may further be augmented by adding non-normative text that provides more information. The Working Group is currently prioritizing work on issues for the companion Tracking Preference Expression document [link], in the midst of significant changes.
> 
> 	Revisions from the previous Working Draft include some updated definitions and revised text on security. Reviewers may review changes from the previous Working Draft [link].

Proposed public status update (Compliance and TPE) for group homepage:

> 	*Status update, December 2013:*
> 	The Tracking Protection Working Group is currently prioritizing work on the Tracking Preference Expression document with the goal of closing remaining issues with that specification and moving it to Last Call Working Draft status. Recent work of the group has focused on resolving issues with definitions of terms (including "tracking", "party", "collect", "retain", "network transaction") and some of those updates are reflected in the recent snapshot publication of the Tracking Compliance and Scope document. The group is currently considering significant changes to the Tracking Preference Expression document to resolve dependencies around compliance; the latest Editors' Draft (which reviewers should know may not be stable) reflects those changes. 
	
Comments welcome (via email, or maybe we can grab a minute on the teleconference). These personal proposals are provided in the hope that they will make it easier for us to dispense with this process/transparency piece and continue our substantive work.

Thanks,
Nick