charter template for Community Group used by a large Working Group

Sending this in case it's something WebApps may be interested in. It's a 
Community Group Charter template [1] designed to create a Community 
Group that is used by a large Working Group like WebApps or CSS or DAP 
to do things like investigate areas that aren't ready for 
standardization.  It would be like an incubator group for the Working 
Group.

That can already be done in separate Community Groups unrelated to the 
Working Group (and that would continue).  The only difference is that 
for this Community Group, the affiliated Working Group controls the 
Charter (and can ensure it has provisions that guarantee fairness) and 
the WG can direct what specs can be worked on in their affiliated 
Community Group.

Someone who wants a spec to get into WebApps could approach the WG, and 
if the WG was interested, but not sure, it could ask them to do it in 
the affiliated CG.  WG members who wanted to work on more exploratory 
work without having to license all the exploratory work could join the 
affiliated Community Group and opt-in to work on particular specs. (so 
it's one affiliated Community Group, potentially with dozens of 
incubator specs and participants explicitly opt-in to specs their 
employer's want them to work on).

An affiliated CG like this could be a good place to start work on a 
risky spec that may not succeed.  In a Community Group, patent licensing 
for one's own contributions happens right away (not when its finished) 
and the copyright license allows anyone to pick it up and work on it 
elsewhere, so if it fails, but some are interested, they can continue to 
work on it.  It's more difficult to continue work elsewhere (like in a 
Community Group) when a WG spec fails.

Just passing this on in case it is of interest.  I also posted a couple 
of other templates for other types of Community Groups to the same list, 
both not directly affiliated with a WG.  One is for potentially large 
number of specs or where the scope and deliverables are not clear and 
another one for a more focused Community Group that knows what specs it 
wants to produce (the current template on the CG site changed to use 
GitHub).  For all of these, a goal is to have it be easier to get 
permission to join the Community Group because the scope is either clear 
or else obligations are per spec when you opt-in.

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-council/2015Mar/0012.html

Received on Sunday, 29 March 2015 00:18:21 UTC