Assessing consensus and our voting process

Hi all!

There’s a couple of significant decisions that this group needs to take, namely:

1. Whether to handover the finalization of the WebID spec to the Solid WG
2. If so, whether to nominate me as the editor of a “consensus report”, a document summarizing the different points of view on all aspects of WebID to offer to the Solid WG as a starting point for their work on WebID itself

As per its charter [1], this group seeks to make decisions when there is consensus, with consensus defined by the W3C Process Document [2] as 

> Consensus:
>  A substantial number of individuals in the set support the decision and there is no sustained objection from anybody in the set. Individuals in the set may abstain. Abstention is either an explicit expression of no opinion or silence by an individual in the set.  

Unfortunately, this group has clearly been struggling with producing any kind of consensus for a long time. IMHO, this is due to two reasons: 

1. only few members are active members
2. active members disagree on a number of issues

Given that the group’s charter does not indicate how to proceed and the Chair is often unresponsive, we need to figure out a way forward. 

In the presence of persistent and sustained objections and disagreements that prevent consensus from being achieved, the W3C Process Document suggests that

> Groups should favor proposals that create the weakest objections.

This helps but doesn’t resolve the issue of most members being inactive ones. Gathering a significant number of votes / feedbacks is difficult, even when restricting the voting pool to those who’ve been active on this list within the last few months. In cases like this, the W3C Process Document suggests:

1. Assessing consensus by means of “lazy consensus”, in which lack of objection after sufficient notice is taken as assent
2. Defining a minimum threshold of active support beyond which a vote is considered valid

As neither of these is mentioned in this group’s charter, I kindly ask all active members to state which of these two options they like best, with the goal of picking one of these as a way to move forward. In the case of "lazy consensus”, I also ask you to indicate the length of time you would consider acceptable as “sufficient notice”. In the case of the threshold of active support, I also ask you to define such threshold in terms of number of votes (or any other quantifiable metric you would feel comfortable with). If you do not find any of these acceptable, I would be thankful if you could explain why.

I would be a lot more comfortable with some guidance from our Chair as W3C guidelines [4] indicate that the Chair should be in charge of calling for votes on significant issues and nominating editors. I literally lack any formal mandate to write this email and propose this course of action. However, we are being called to make a significant decision and, in the absence of our Chair, I’d like this group to rise to the occasion in a manner that respects all the time that we have collectively spent working on WebID.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/charter 
[2]: https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20230612/#Consensus 
[4]: https://www.w3.org/Guide/chair/role.html

Received on Thursday, 6 July 2023 10:22:52 UTC