2nd Draft Announcement of Process2015 Wide Review

The 2nd draft text of the Review Request letter that is to go to public-w3process@w3.org<mailto:public-w3process@w3.org>, chairs@w3.org<mailto:chairs@w3.org> and ac-member@w3.org<mailto:ac-member@w3.org>. This document is expected to be signed by Jeff (for AB), Chaals (as editor) and myself (as TF chair)

[Changes since the previous draft:

*        A phrase noting that addition changes, beyond those actually promised but allowed for, have been made was added to the third paragraph

*        A revised discussion of Issue-152 (based on the e-mail thread and the notes in the issue itself) has been added to the end of this letter and the note for inclusion in the Process Document text has been simplified.]

Steve Z

Please review the current draft of Process2015 [1] and respond by 31 March. Comments should be sent to public-w3process@w3.org<mailto:public-w3process@w3.org> and may be copied to any list you think relevant to the comment.

On July 31, 2014 we announced [2],
"The AB is re-launching the [Process Document] TF with two tasks: ProcessDoc2015, a short term structural update and the prioritization and processing of the outstanding issues. The short term structural update has three sub-tasks: (1) the removal of "Activities" a step already approved by the AB; (2) splitting the current Process document into three separate documents: an "administrative" document containing introduction/references/table of contents, a document relevant to Members, and a document with information relevant to participants in general that includes the Recommendation process but also things like group decisions, and who can participate under what conditions; and (3) fixing editorial issues that arose with the 2014 Process document and any other issues on which consensus is reached in time to allow at least two rounds of AC review."

This work has been substantially completed so this is the first of the above "two rounds of AC review. " At the request of the editor the document has not been split into three separate documents because that increased the difficulty of maintenance. But, the other projected changes and some additional ones on which consensus was reached (see below for a list of these) have been made.

We are asking for wide review of this document so that comments can be received and acted upon in time to have an AC Review Document sent to the AC prior to the May 5-7, 2015 AC Meeting. The closing date of March 31 for comments was chosen to allow the TF to complete comment processing in April and prepare the AC Review Draft.  At the time of this message, there is only one open issue, Issue-152 [3] on section 7.7.2 and for this issue there is a note in the document noting the issue. See below (after the change list) for additional information on the issue.

Please read the document and send any concerns to public-w3process@w3.org<mailto:public-w3process@w3.org> .

The second task in the July 2014 announcement was to begin work on Process2016 to deal with issues that need more discussion. That work is still in progress.

[1] [temp] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/AB/raw-file/default/cover.html
[2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2014JulSep/0029.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/152

List of Changes
Remove Activities from the Process (as resolved multiple times since 2007)
Remove 6.2.1.7 Good Standing in a Working Group
Remove Coordination groups - ISSUE-129
Loosen constraints on multiple employees of a single member being on TAG - section 2.5.1
Replace "W3C Chair" with "CEO" and preserve instance
that have a clear role such as chairing the AC and AB meetings
Remove section 6.2.7 "Heartbeat" publishing requirement,
in favor of the first requirement of section 7.3.2
Editorial cleanups to 7.2.3.1 Wide Review
               e.g. add liaisons to be considered in wide review
Editorial Changes to 7.7.1 Errata Management - ISSUE-141

A detailed list of resolutions of the TF are in Summary of Resolutions re Process 2015
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2015Jan/0029.html

Discussion of Issue-152
It has been asserted that Process2014<http://www.w3.org/2014/Process-20140801/> has made the publication of Edited Recommendations more difficult in the case when they only have corrections that do not affect conformance and that this change was un-intended. For this kind of change, Process2005<http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/> does not require any "technical review of the proposed changes." This also holds for Process2014, but an additional step, publication as a Proposed Recommendation, has been added.

One focus of the discussion was whether there is a clear enough boundary between "editorial changes" and "substantive changes" to separate cases 2 and 3 of the classes of changes, section 7.2.5 of Process2014
http://www.w3.org/2014/Process-20140801/#correction-classes

The test example was the case where, in the preparation of the REC, an update was made in one place in the specification, causing a second place in the specification to conflict with the update. That is, the second place should have been updated as well.

It is clear that the intent of the working group was to make the change they thought they had completely made. There was a discussion as to whether fixing the "second place" above would be an "editorial" (class 2) change or a "substantive" (class 3) change. Arguments can be made for both interpretations. It was noted that an implementer may have only consulted the second place (and missed the update to the first place) so that making a change to the second place could affect his/her implementation. It was also noted that since such updates seem to be allowed by the 2005 Process, this does not seem to be a problem in practice.

The discussion of this issue has been broadened to include a discussion of Patent considerations; that is, whether a definition of "editorial change" can be specific enough that a simple process can verify a given set of changes are "editorial" and do not (or most likely do not) introduce possible patent infringements.

By "simple process" above, is meant (a) trusting the Working Group (and its chairs), (b) having a Team member confirm the assessment or (c) having a short AC review that could detect possible patent issues and would then trigger a full Call for Exclusions if a patent issue were raised. Process 2005 used (a) above.

The two positions that have been expressed are:

1.      Patent infringements can be subtle and without a Call for Exclusions that would guarantee a Royalty Free License from all participating Members the editorial changes could have introduced an (unintentionally) required infringement.

2.      The changes that (typically) introduce infringements would also change conformance requirements and would not be editorial. As noted above, changes that clarify ambiguous specifications should be treated as changing (making more restrictive) conformance requirements. If this is noted in the definition of "editorial changes" then evaluation of a given set of editorial changes can be done by a simple process.

The Process Document TF seeks input from the AC to resolve this issue, both in clarifying the definition of "editorial change" and what level of process is necessary to make such changes.