Re: Update on the Council on the Timed Text WG charter

Hi all,

Thank you Amy for taking us to this point.

The Council just had a meeting early this week, and I believe we should be able to reach a conclusion quickly, hopefully in the next week or two. Very sorry we have kept you waiting, and thank you for your patience. I assure you the whole Council, myself included, understand that getting to a timely conclusion is important.

In the meanwhile, if either the Working Group (or its chairs) or the Objectors would like to talk to me to get some clarity on what has happened so far and where we stand in terms of process, I am happy to schedule a call. I cannot tell you what the Council's conclusion is before it reaches a conclusion, but I can shed light on how we got here, and what is left to do. Let me know.

I would also like to share with you all a few things about how the AB, Team, and the Process CG have evolved the Process to reduce the risk of further delays in this and future Councils:
* We've introduced the ability to change chairs when necessary, as Amy mentioned, to reduce our dependency on individual availability
* We have included a Team Contact [5] into the Council's meetings and mailing list [6]. This should help in several ways:
    - Adding one person with the explicit responsibility of ensuring the Council follows all relevant clauses of the Process, including deadlines, should help things go smoother.
    - When there are follow up actions outside of the Council itself, as was here the case with the need to talk to the WG and to the Objectors, the Team Contact can help make sure that they get done in a timely manner, or to remind the Council to resume deliberations if the actions or their responses time out.
    - The Team Contact may also help with meeting scheduling, which is unfortunately fairly time consuming given the number of people involved.
* This Council also took a while before it even started. The November 3rd date Amy mentioned was already a fair while after the Formal Objections were filed. There are quite a few things the Team needs to do before the Council is ready to roll. There is now detailed documentation (this will be turned into a /Guide article before long) of every step that needs to be taken, identifying who needs to take it, but that wasn't yet written when this started, so future Councils will be faster.

—Florian

[5] https://github.com/w3c/w3process/pull/701/files <https://github.com/w3c/w3process/pull/701/files>
[6] https://github.com/w3c/w3process/pull/702/files <https://github.com/w3c/w3process/pull/702/files>

> On 2Mar 2023, at 6:59, rhiaro <amy@rhiaro.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> As previously reported [1], the Timed Text WG charter FO Council was initially convened on November 3rd. We had our first meeting on November 21st, and met with the Working Group on November 24th to suggest a potential avenue for consensual resolution, hoping it would be quick. Unfortunately, it was not. It took longer than expected to get answers from the Formal Objectors as to whether the changes the WG was willing to make would satisfy them (they did not [2][3]), and by the time we had clarity on that, my schedule had changed, and I was no longer sufficiently available to drive this to a quick conclusion.
> 
> The draft Process for the Council did not initially have provisions for a change of Chair, but the AB recently introduced exactly that [4], so in the interest of wrapping this up with no further delay, I've proposed to the Council to change Chair, and Florian was approved by consensus. He'll take it from here.
> 
> Thanks for your patience,
> 
> Amy
> 
> [1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-forum/2023JanMar/0077.html
> [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-charters-review/2023Jan/0017.html
> [3] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-charters-review/2023Jan/0014.html
> [4] https://github.com/w3c/w3process/pull/709/files
>