Re: DRAFT Agenda for the Process Call Wednesday 12th February 7am PDT

>  4) Formal call for consensus to forward the document to the AB and the wider community.

Now that I have no affiliation with WHATWG or Microsoft, I will go on record saying I don’t agree that this document is ready to forward to the AB and wider community.  I regret not having argued for my position earlier on, but my opinion is NOT that of  “Microsoft” and I suspect the WHATWG SG doesn’t have a strong opinion or want to jeopardize the emerging collaboration by expressing it.

Briefly  I’ve been in software for 40 years and standards for more than 20; I’ve seen a lot of failed projects. The current situation  has a lot of red flags that “smell” like impending failure to me.

Why?
-  It’s being rushed.  “Move fast and break things”  has been a disaster for the web, and it’s a particularly bad approach to foundational documents  such as the patent policy. Previous schedules have slipped, but the delivery date has not. There has been pushback on some Process CG proposals along the lines of “we don’t have time to make sure we’re doing it right” … is there time to do it all over later?   As for the parallel work on the patent policy:   I haven’t had any visibility into PSIG for a couple weeks now, but I know it took a similar team of lawyers from mostly the same companies many months to get agreement on the 2017 WHATWG agreements, the WHATWG-W3C MoU, and the (still pending last I heard) WHATWG privacy policy. Don’t be fooled by agreement on principle, it’s the numerous, mostly hypothetical devils in the details that lawyers get paid to worry about.

- It’s too complex.  One can argue, as I still do in Issue https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/346 <https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/346> that the proposed process itself is too complex.  But an even bigger red flag is that the dependencies between the proposed patent policy  and process are so complex that they must move in lockstep.   Complex dependencies moving targets are a portent of project doom in my experience. 

- Little solid stakeholder buy-in.  W3M and the AB are taking the lack of strong opposition at TPAC  and afterwards as evidence of support.  I’m not sure that’s a valid inference even about the W3C community.  The Service Workers WG -- the main target of the “living standards” features -- has given a lukewarm at best endorsement in https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/346#issuecomment-554701435 <https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/346#issuecomment-554701435> . As for the broader community, I can easily see some interpreting this as yet another skirmish in a turf war (“no more bleeding of W3C work to WHATWG!!!”) rather than a respectful move to learn from WHATWG’s success and allow groups that are outside WHATWG’s scope to develop W3C-flavored Living Standards.

What’s the alternative?  I’d suggest:

1. Restart the PSIG conversation on the basis of the existing Process, aiming  to get locked-in patent commitments after the CR exclusion period expires.  Don't add complicated interdependences between a draft PP and a draft Process.  Give PSIG time to fix some of the worst bugs, archaic references, and ambiguities while they are at it. Such a patent policy would  allow WGs to call CR’s “living standards” because they have solid patent commitments, and CRs can get updated fairly quickly if wide review finds problems.

2.Move ahead with Process 2020 by removing any features that depend on an updated patent policy.  The original Everteal proposal addressed real problems the CSS WG has with the current Director review overhead.  The fixes were proposed by the CSS editors, so I am confident they fix the problem. If it takes longer than a couple months to back out the new PP dependencies and various flavors of CRs, take the time to do it cleanly.

3.On some sort of Evergreen / living standards mode:  Define the problem  to be solved and get broad consensus on the outline of a solution before drafting Process text. If “stopping the bleeding to WHATWG” is an objective, be up front about it and explain to the wider community why you think (for example) a Service Workers Living Standard should come from W3C rather than WHATWG. Start a conversation with the AC, WHATWG, and key WG chairs on how to deal with Living Standards.  Maybe …. Is  CR with a patent commitment a good enough solution for W3C?  … Should W3C double down on its traditional role as the ratifier of stable, widely-reviewed standards? …If so, maybe Living Standards get developed in WHATWG and snapshots standardized in W3C via something the MoU? Or maybe some Living Recommendation process along the lines of (but maybe simplified from) the Process 2020 draft is what the community really needs. 


I don’t intend to take time on the call tomorrow to press my case for doing a reset on Process 2020 rather than plowing ahead.  I doubt if anyone on the call wants to go on record as agreeing with the above, and I don’t want to waste your time or mine.  But I do want my dissent on the record, and we can see where things stand in a year or two to assess who was closer to being right :-)