Re: Workshop and meeting requirements

On 2014-05-13 09:34, David Singer wrote:
> There are a lot of inter-related concepts at play here, and some of them are in conflict.
>
> Even if the process formally says that decisions made at face to face meetings are not final, there is strong social pressure — and indeed, for meetings to be effective, there needs to be strong social pressure — to allow the meeting to set a direction and move ahead.  “Look, maybe you have a point, but we discussed this for two days in Uttar Pradesh, and we need very convincing arguments to re-open the discussion.”

(while it isn't now) I'd like that to be the rule, that decisions at 
meetings have to be confirmed on the mail list (if only by object to 
decisions in the meeting minutes within 2 weeks or they stand). Given 
participation from all over the world, distributed meetings can be 
scheduled middle of the night always for some participants.

>
> I think if you really want a workshop with an open-ended international attendance, on a subject important enough to warrant international travel, it really ought to be possible to plan 8 weeks in advance, be clear about the subject and agenda of the workshop — and prioritize attendance based on demonstrated interest and ability to contribute (statements of interest, position papers, and so on).

And a meeting that doesn't follow those rules could be called something 
other than a Workshop.

It's useful to have the notion of a Workshop for the 2 purposes set out 
in the Process document and to have rules for that (required notice, 
allowing the option of using position papers and selection).  But, that 
doesn't imply there can't be other meetings not called a Workshop 
(including for those same 2 reasons).   WGs can't have a WG meeting on 
short notice (unless there are no objections), but they can have other 
meetings with the community or whomever which are not formal WG business 
meetings (e.g. cannot make WG decisions).


>
> Travel starts to get expensive as periods shorten; we’re not all rich (and the rich didn’t get that way by being careless about money, either), and visa requirements and so on can be time-consuming. If “all X have the right to attend” but not the opportunity, how strong are the rights?
>
> But at the opposite extreme, sometimes a question comes up in a working group, and a subset volunteer “look, let’s get together around a whiteboard and in a place we can experiment, and we’ll report back” that clearly doesn’t need nearly as much planning (and it’s done all the time). Perhaps it’s worth stating as a principle that the strength of an outcome is roughly proportional to the opportunity to be involved in it; so a formal vote of all members of a WG is stronger than a consensus at a face to face meeting, which is stronger than the outcome of an informal get-together, and so on.

But informal get-togethers have no standing at all in the WG.    CfC 
doesn't seem to be in the process.  That may be worth adding with some 
description of how WG participants can request stronger forms of 
evaluating consensus.  e.g. Director's appeal > mail list vote > mail 
list CfC > other means of Chair estimation of consensus (including 
decisions at WG meetings).

>
> Remote participation is better than no participation; but in-person presence is still vastly better than remote participation. We only have to look at the WebRTC meeting in Shenzhen and Seattle to realize that one group (as it happened, in the official location in Shenzhen) felt that they were in second class by virtue of being remote from what transpired to be the main meeting.
>
> WG meetings, and sub-meetings, really are different from open events. The list of candidates for a WG meeting (the members) is known in advance, and can self-indicate a desire to be involved. Open workshops have no such advantage; indeed, often a major point of them is to help locate appropriate talent and expertise we were previously unaware of.  That takes time.
>
> If it’s worth holding a meeting, it’s worth keeping and publishing a record (I doubt anyone disagrees with this, though people tend to get lax after a meeting has happened and the excitement has passed).

A WG can also decide to do something like hold an open discussion with 
interested members of the community somewhere they choose to get 
feedback on some question and to call it a W3C X WG community meeting, 
can't they?  (not a formal WG meeting, no WG decisions possible).  If 
the TAG had wanted to call the recent meeting a W3C Tag community forum, 
is there anything that would have prevented that?  If a WG wants to 
create a subgroup to investigate something to generate information, not 
decisions, those people can meet without any set notice, can't they?  
There's nothing blocking any of that, is there?  I don't see why we'd 
need to address any of that in the process.


>
>
> Dave Singer
>
> singer@mac.com
>
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2014 18:17:16 UTC