Process Document 2016 Proposed Text Revisions

All,

The AB began a project in November 2013 to begin to solve some of the issues
related to Supergroups (Working Groups that persist over long periods and
often have multiple interlocking specifications). The issue set was outlined
in:

  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-supergroups/2013Nov/0002.html

One of the issues that was identified was Patent Licensing Commitments.
Recently, David Singer came up with the insight that Patent Licensing
commitments are tied to documents in the Recommendation Track (and not to
charters). That led to a proposal, jointly developed by the AB and PSIG, see
below, to adopt some Process steps that would better clarify this
relationship and enable better tracking of such commitments. 

I have accepted the action to assemble the set of changes that are proposed
for Process 2016, In the process of trying to prepare change text for the
Patent Licensing Commitment changes for the Process 2016 Draft, I found that
I had a number of issues with the text (but not the intent) of the most
recent change proposal that was attached to

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-psig/2016AprJun/0031.html 

The issues I had were:

1.      The major change being proposed is suggested as a new section 6.2.6,
but the requirements for charters are listed in Section 5.2.6 of the Process
2015 document. Since this is a requirement for new charters, it should go in
section 5.2.6

2.       The term "LCWD" is used. This term was explicitly removed from
Process 2015 and was replace by Candidate Recommendation. (Process 2015
notes that Candidate Recommendation should be interpreted as being the Last
Call Working Draft mentioned in the Patent Policy.) The second complication
is that LCWD is used in a different way than the original LCWD that was
eliminated. In your proposed change, LCWD refers to a draft that has
completed its Exclusion Period. In Process documents prior to dropping LCWD,
LCWD referred to the document that was sent out for the Exclusion Review and
there was no implication as to whether that Exclusion Period had completed
or not. It would be very confusing to both re-introduce LCWD and to
re-introduce it with a (subtly) different definition. 

3.      For the same reason that 'Reference Draft" was introduced to avoid a
long phrase, I suggest that the term, 'Exclusion Completed Draft' be used
for the phrase, 'Reference Draft or LCWD', especially since 'LCWD' should
not be used for reason 2. above. The full phrase would be, 'Reference Draft
or Candidate Recommendation whose Exclusion Period had completed.'

4.      As noted in Section 5.2.6, the documents to be processed by the
(re-chartered) WG are listed under Deliverables. Therefore, to me, it makes
more sense to require each such Deliverable that is a Recommendation Track
document that has a prior Exclusion Completed Draft to have the three
required URLs which would be labelled: Adopted Working Draft, Most Current
Exclusion Completed Draft, and Charter under which Adopted Working Draft was
published. Calling out explicit labels that should be used seems better than
saying, "The proposed charter must further explicitly state that the
Reference Draft or LCWD is deemed to be a Reference Draft or LCWD,
respectively, of the new Working Group."

5.      Both of the terms, 'Reference Draft' and 'Exclusion Completed Draft'
are normative so they should not be introduced in a Note which makes them
non-normative.

6.      We (the W3C) have had numerous examples where slightly different
wording in referring to the same thing has produce unclarilty; for example
in the 4.2 phrase quoted above there is use of "leaving" a group and
"resigning" from a group. Are these the same or different things. To avoid
this I have tried to make the initial phrases of the 5.2.6 and the 5.2.2
changes both to use "deliverables involving continued work on a" [draft
where the draft that is referenced is slightly different in each case.]

To make it easier to understand what I am saying, I have edited the draft
for sections 6.2.6  and 5.2.2 to reflect solutions to the topics I raised
above. These edits are attached (to this message) as a Word Document to
avoid losing the mark-up that shows the changes. I am not attached to this
particular text nor the terms that I introduced; I am just trying to find
text that fits better with Process 2015. Depending on your views, I can send
the above issues and the proposed resolutions to PSIG and the Process CG. 

The additions are in red and the deletions are shown with strikethroughs. In
making these changes my intent was to capture (in a hopefully simpler way)
what the Helene's most recent document said. If I have failed to do that, I
apologize.

Steve Z