RE: Comments on: W3C Process2015

Steve wrote:

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“A Candidate Recommendation is a document that satisfies the Working Group's technical requirements, has already received wide review, and has been reviewed by W3C’s horizontal groups.”
[SZ] What you are asking for already exists within Process 2014, but it may not be as obvious as you would like. The drafters of Process 2014 were and continue to be concerned about facilitating Horizontal Reviews. In that context several things have been done. The first is that dependencies between a Working Group and various Horizontal Groups MUST be identified in that Working Group’s Charter.
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I don’t think using the Charter is realistic or all that helpful to the Internationalization WG. It suggests that there are some charters where we should not appear as a dependency (which I agree with) and thus not be given a chance to do a review (which I don’t).

Frequently the organizers of new Working Groups don’t recognize or identify internationalization issues at charter time because what they are developing doesn’t present high-level Internationalization issues. But at the same time, nearly any Specification can have internationalization (or other horizontal group) considerations buried inside it. In the cases where there is no formal dependency in the Charter between the horizontal WG and the spec developers, the responsibility of checking the Spec falls onto the horizontal team, and, unless horizontal teams are a required part of “wide review”, the Process isn’t helping horizontal teams do a good job.

One possibility is that we’re saying that every Charter includes every one (or at least most) of the horizontal groups, but this seems to run against the point of calling out dependencies in the Charter. Or it means that we’re okay with “stuff slipping through” because a document with no explicit internationalization (or whatever) needs at charter time ends up having such an (unidentified) issue later.

I agree with Chaals that FPWD is a good time to start the review process. Reviewing at LCWD is not necessarily a great experience: identifying I18N problems when the WG thinks they are nearly done--when code has been written and compromises have been made--is a tough sell.

While the changes I’m requesting are generally editorial to the process, I do still think changes are needed. Most specifically, it should be possible for the Director to know that “wide review” included any and all horizontal reviews that turned out to be needed, even if the horizontal group was indifferent (“we don’t see a need to review this document”). I think that means that horizontal review is an explicit part of “wide review” rather than implied by (possible) inclusion in the Charter and, ideally, that we find some way of knowing that the horizontal groups have been reached.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Chair (W3C I18N WG)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.