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

On 2015-01-11 08:53, Revising W3C Process Community Group Issue Tracker 
wrote:
> 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.

I think you may mean quit to avoid a licensing obligation/exclusion 
period that applies to that TR.  The disclosure requirement in section 6 
is separate and your hypothetical seems to satisfy the conditions that 
trigger it.  So, they wouldn't be avoiding disclosure.

I don't see a real need to change the text that's already there, but if 
we do change it to say how one quits a group, it also needs to include 
quitting by not rejoining when the WG recharters.  Any new text should 
also keep the link to the patent policy section on quitting WGs.


>
> 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.
>
>

Is there still a problem to be mitigated?


I assume W3C keeps track of when Members (not participants, Members and 
IEs) join or quit WGs, so W3C can determine what exclusion periods there 
were for any Member and what TR they applied to.  That we don't need a 
Process change to make that possible.

Whether it is public information about when Members (not participants) 
joined of left WG is public seems a different issue that doesn't depend 
on exactly how someone quits (or presumably joins)







>

Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2015 00:45:43 UTC