w3process-ISSUE-151 (Resigning from a WG): How to resign from a working group [Process Document]

w3process-ISSUE-151 (Resigning from a WG): How to resign from a working group [Process Document]

http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/151

Raised by: Charles McCathie Nevile
On product: Process Document

The current Process says
[[[
3.6 Resignation from a Group

A W3C Member or Invited Expert MAY resign from a group. The Team will establish administrative procedures for resignation. See section 4.2. of the W3C Patent Policy [PUB33] for information about obligations remaining after resignation from certain groups.
]]]
After a decade and a bit, we could probably do better than that. In practice people *have* resigned from Working Groups. Do we need a formal definition?

It would mostly be relevant because the Patent Policy allows 60 days from the date of resignation to exclude material added between the FPWD+60 and the most recent Public Working draft - without a clear way of finding the date we could see problems identifying the last Public Working Draft, and the expiry of the 60 days.

Proposed:

"On written notification from an AC rep or invited expert, or equivalent action to formally leave the WG (e.g. through an automated join/leave system), the member's representatives will be deemed to have resigned from the relevant Group, effective immediately".

The edge case I see is a group agreeing to a Public Working Draft, and before it is *published* a member resigns in order to avoid having a disclosure obligation relative to material in that draft.

One possible mitigation would be to require that the resignation is announced publicly, but I believe this is not what people have generally preferred to do in the past.

Received on Sunday, 11 January 2015 16:53:45 UTC