Re: Early draft of new standards proposal

On 4 Aug 2010, at 10:59, Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote:

> The table is quite useful; it would probably be useful to highlight what
> are the things that are still to be defined, since that's the places
> where we need concrete input as soon as possible. Also, I'm not sure if
> you're interested in feedback on the proposed items for the new
> processes or not (that wasn't part of your question); I'm sending it in
> any case :)

I'll throw another dimension in: Are there any of the existing processes that we should throw out? If, for example, we accept the "community group" idea, then it's not clear that there's a need for incubators to continue existing.

> I'm not sure if the so-called "new idea forum" is anything more than
> www-talk? If so, and given that most of the lines in the table are N/A,
> I'm not sure it's really worth keeping in.

+1 -- I don't think we should try to introduce a process where the best thing to do is to live without one.

> I think the "mostly boilerplate" allusion for the charter of W3C
> community groups should be removed; if anything should disappear from a
> lightweight charter, it should be the boilerplate. My view is that a
> group's charter explains to the world what the group is working on, and
> helps the group stay focus on a reduced set of topics; I think that
> remains useful no matter the type of the group; but it may be that the
> charter should not be a prerequisite to start the work, and that it in
> fact be one of the first work items of the group.

+1 to that as well.  The basic idea could be that some incubator-like organism can be put together for a limited time, gets to write the charter, and is only then advertised to the AC.

> "Approval required": if a chartered group is responsible for approval,
> it probably needs to be provided with a set of criteria, which I guess
> this task force should at least start drafting; is a PigML WCG OK? is a
> WCG on political topics OK? is a WCG on whale fishing OK? Getting any
> kind of review in less than one business day is going to be hard, no
> matter what. I think that again, there is probably a need to distinguish
> various approval/review steps (one is about getting some basic
> infrastructure e.g. to discuss a potential charter which should probably
> granted very freely and in almost no time, start working on a concrete
> spec, etc; another is reviewing/announcing a charter once it solidifies,
> gathering IPR commitments, etc.)

The question you're asking boils down to another one: What's the governance model (if any) for these groups?  E.g., do we expect to have groups around competing technologies as a matter of routine?  Do we permit a community group that pursues a technology that competes with a WG? What's the expectation for community consensus around charters? What's the expectation for consistency with (some version of) web architecture?

It'll be important to be fairly explicit about that sort of thing, or at the very least about processes and decision-making.

> "Consensus-building requirement" is ambiguous: is it inside the group,
> or for the group with the rest of the world?
> This actually opens a different question that probably need to be
> raised: who is allowed to join a WCG and when? can someone be refused
> from joining a group? can someone be ejected from a group?

Received on Wednesday, 4 August 2010 09:25:52 UTC