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

From: Jeff Jaffe [mailto:jeff@w3.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2015 8:03 AM
To: Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH); W3C Process Community Group
Subject: Re: " W3C Culture" CG? RE: Problems I'd like to see addressed in Process 2016


On 4/23/2015 12:47 AM, Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) wrote:
> Do we need a "W3C culture" CG ?
[SZ] I think the point you make below is we need a “Best Practices collection”, especially with moving work forward. (There are other aspects of “culture, such as how we treat each other.)

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.
[SZ] I still believe that the Process should be minimal, documenting important definitions, procedural rules and guarantees. That means that there needs to be another document, traditionally it has been the Guide (to the W3C for Chairs) and, traditionally, the Team has been responsible for collecting that information and publishing the Guide. I think changes to the Process should be controlled (as they are today) with an AC Review and Director’s decision to implement a new document. The Guide, however, is more like a Wikipedia for W3C. That is, establishing a control structure like that of Wikipedia where things are “crowd sourced” would seem to make a lot of sense. It may need a CG to help maintain it, but Wikipedia seems to work without such a structure. I also see no harm in having the Process CG help with the Guide if they are interested. I do think that having two CGs (a Process CG and Guide CG) with a large overlap in content is likely to lead to confusion and/or duplicate membership.

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?

I think you captured it well, above.

We've had a maniacal focus in the last iterations to shorten the size of the Process Document and excise best practices and folk wisdom.

If we change directions and embrace a larger document with lots of advice then we could do all of this in the Process CG.

But if we intend to insist on a terse document, then a separate culture CG with documentation thereof would be helpful.

Coordination is but one, recent example.  When we excised Coordination Groups in Process2015 we did not feel obligated to list the myriad approaches that folks should use to improve coordination.

You asked who could chair such a Culture CG.  I'm willing to chair the "draft Champion as Chair" movement.





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.