Re: Limiting Charter extensions

21.12.2014, 19:40, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>:
> On Sunday 2014-12-21 13:20 +0300, chaals@yandex-team.ru wrote:
>>  21.12.2014, 01:44, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>:
>>>  And I've certainly seen the rechartering process take a very long
>>>  time, possibly more than a year for a single rechartering.  Though
>>>  perhaps it's gotten more lightweight recently.
>>  The process has never been very heavy. You you write a charter, W3M reviews it, the AC review it, unless there are major objections you publish it. Even the worst case in recent memory - HTML and the license experiment - only took months. And a lot of that time was because instead of just holding the discussion and making decisions, W3C tried to sort out everything in advance so there was no disagreement. So successfully that even the people whose original objection they were trying to satisfy were not satisfied with the result.
>
> The CSS 2010-2011 rechartering took over a year.  Discussion in the
> WG started in August of 2010 [1] and the charter was approved in
> December of 2011 [2].

How exactly was that time used? I agree that rechartering is often slow, but having gone through the process many times, as Staff contact, WG member, AC rep who has formally objected to a good handful of charters, and chair, my impression is consistently that not very much *happens* in that time.

> The most recent CSS rechartering took only 7.5 months, from November
> 2013 [3] to July 2014 [4] (though the previous charter originally
> expired in September 2013, so maybe that should count as 9 months).

Well, the time would be around 7.5 months, it's just that the discussion started a bit later than it should have...

And again, what had to be done?

The group agrees on a charter. For a group like CSS or Webapps, with dozens of specs in scope, that can take weeks. But that's already at the extreme end.

There is an AC review. Again, that takes a few weeks - but until the results appear, there is nothing the group has to *do*. 

If there is significant dissent - for example, the HTML experiment generated a formal objection, the proposed response generated 7, or for another example certain charters have been modified because of foreshadowed IPR claims - there needs to be some discussion, an attempt at resolution, perhaps another.

According to http://www.w3.org/Consortium/activities#XSLT_Working_Group 14 out of 46 working groups are out of charter. Some by a couple of months, but many by a year or more. 3 out of 16 Interest groups, and one of the 3 coordination groups, is also out of charter - again, the average time is a lot.  That suggests there is something about how our process is meant to work that isn't happening.

I'm afraid that in my view the appropriate response is "well, checking that we agree on what to work on is too hard, let's just ignore it".

If the requirement to charter according to the process is really so bad, insisting we do it would show that up very fast. I don't believe that is the case, but as an AC rep it seems that if W3C wants to argue it is using our membership fees wisely, and as a participant it seems that if W3C wants to argue that it is focusing on things that matter, then I would be more readily convinced if they demonstrated that within 3 years, any given piece of work was seriously reviewed to make sure it was on track and covering things that were useful.

cheers

> -David
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Sep/0001.html
> [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-members/2011OctDec/0063.html
> [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Nov/0371.html
> [4] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-members/2014JulSep/0001.html
>
> --
> 𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
> 𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
>              Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
>              What I was walling in or walling out,
>              And to whom I was like to give offense.
>                - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Sunday, 21 December 2014 18:08:38 UTC