Re-visiting how to charter WGs

Currently, charters for new WGs are semi-shrouded in mystery. While the
AC is notified when chartering begins, there is no way for the community
itself to ask for a WG to be chartered without going through the W3C Staff.

While sometimes this may be a good thing as the W3C staff successfully
charters WG in the best interest of the Web, but in some domains the W3C
staff is unqualified in terms of the modern Web (such as is often the
case in security, such as the demand for the Credentials CG to be a WG
[1]) or may have some other motivational structure for starting a new
WG:  For example, the current process allows W3C staff to run
'skunkworks' research projects as Working Groups and for WGs that
industry and users are not interested in (or even against) to be
chartered, but a small persistent group of hobbyists (that may include
W3C staff) are pushing for.

Currently we have set a higher-bar at AC voting - but would a new
transparent process help?

I'm not sure of the details, but it seems with the amount of activity in
CGs would provide empirical data, and there should be some objective
threshold involving commitment in terms of implementation and real users.

I would like to see this issue taken up by the CG and AB.

This ask by the Credentials CG to be a WG in this blog post [1] and
their analysis [2] is a pretty good test-case. Without the W3C hat on, I
see a good case for standardizing vocabularies around health care or
education. I don't see much of a case here [3] for replicating the work
of OAuth, JOSE, FIDO, and then layering a somewhat incorrect mental
model of GPG with multi-origin key material (obviously a security and
privacy concern) on the top of the Web just because it uses RDF.

          yours,
                harry

[1] http://manu.sporny.org/2015/credentials-via-w3c/
[2] http://manu.sporny.org/2015/credentials-retrospective/
[3] http://opencreds.org/specs/source/identity-credentials/

Received on Wednesday, 19 August 2015 21:33:39 UTC