" W3C Culture" CG? RE: Problems I'd like to see addressed in Process 2016

> Do we need a "W3C culture" CG ?

That’s an interesting idea, let’s discuss and look for indications of who would support, draft the “charter”, volunteer to chair, etc.

I’m intrigued because I *almost* added to my message yesterday another point I’ve been hearing – One reason it takes so long to get things done at W3C is the reliance on email, which encourages conversations to wander and fragment rather than move toward a conclusion. Supposedly that’s one reason why people are gravitating toward GitHub – it has an integrated set of tools to raise issues, discuss them, record the resolution, and map the resolution back to a pull request implementing it.

BUT it only takes a bit of discipline and manual labor to do this with Bugzilla and email… so is the problem one of tooling or culture?  Or simply that many chairs don’t know the best practice for getting stuff done by discouraging people to wander off into the weeds when they’re trying to get a spec done?

To some extent the Process Document has been a collection of best practices advice as well as a document describing the rules by which WGs operate.  If that’s the case, then this culture / best practices discussion belongs in this CG, since it’s where a conclusion would be written down. But the sense of the AB and this CG over the last couple of hears has been to separate out the core rules of W3C process from the best practice guidelines, which implies they should be separate documents and CGs.

I’m neutral on whether to have the discussion in a new CG or this CG, but somebody needs to  be doing what Jeff suggested:

>          Identify best practices
>          Assess existing WGs and see where they are failing to implement these best practices
>          Be action oriented - in pushing WGs, their leadership, and the Team to implement these practices.

Thoughts?



From: Jeff Jaffe [mailto:jeff@w3.org]
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 8:54 AM
To: Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH); W3C Process Community Group
Subject: Re: Problems I'd like to see addressed in Process 2016


On 4/21/2015 11:40 PM, Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) wrote:
Admittedly, lots of these points are more about W3C culture or the social norms of standardization than about the Process Document per se.  Likewise, I don’t think the formal process necessarily must change to address these problems, and arguably some proposals should be tried as experiments and only applied to the process document if they succeed.

Do we need a "W3C culture" CG that finds different means to improve our effectiveness outside of a focus on the process document?  I think it is great that we have the ProcessCG to focus on the formal process.  But if we push everything through this CG; and our behavior is always to figure out how to adapt the process document, we might be missing the boat.

A culture CG could:

  *   Identify best practices
  *   Assess existing WGs and see where they are failing to implement these best practices
  *   Be action oriented - in pushing WGs, their leadership, and the Team to implement these practices.