Re: Strawman: Webizen Electoral College

Jeff,

On 19/03/2014 13:21 , Jeff Jaffe wrote:
> I like the idea of an electoral college.  I'm not sure about the exact
> formula, but we can work that out with some tinkering.  In my view, your
> average Affiliate Member is providing not only a Membership fee, but
> also an organization that might be providing implementations or
> defending the Web via RF patent commitments.

I agree that a lot of the value brought by members is not financial but 
through what they contribute (which typically costs them more than 
membership, certainly for the smaller members).

I think that would be the same with Webizens, if it succeeds as a 
community. It won't be every webizen contributing much, but as with all 
communities leading contributors will emerge who will bring a lot.

> Another question that we had discussed at W3M was whether webizens would
> automatically get the privilege of working in WGs without being approved
> through the IE process. The consensus was that the IE route was more
> appropriate when a contributor wanted to participate.  Any thoughts on
> that?

Without having given it much thought, I don't think that being a Webizen 
should grant one access to a member-only WG, but then again most WGs are 
public (certainly most of those likely to be most popular with the Web 
developer community).

So my instinct is to flip the question around: what does the IE status 
bring to public groups? My sense is: not much, if anything at all. It's 
a holdover from the everything-member-only era; it might benefit from a 
rethink. We could make it go away for non-member groups.

The one thing that IE status does bring is the RF commitment. I wonder 
if we could make that a requirement (or perhaps at least an option) upon 
signing up as a Webizen. It's a strong (and useful) thing to say for 
people who wish to declare their commitment to an open web: "I hereby 
grant a royalty-free license to all of my patents to any group in the W3C".

Obviously the commitment would be for the individual and not their 
employer. But individuals have patents too. For instance, I've never had 
much of a stomach for software patents, but as a young researcher in a 
small company that needed an IP portfolio to defend itself against big 
competitors I had to file a few, and they're still under my name and 
therefore mine to grant usage for. (Want to compress a colour as a 
sequence of numbers in a binary-optimised XML tree? Pay up!) I'm pretty 
sure I'm not the only one in this case.

Having a pool of people who've signed the RF commitment in advance would 
be very valuable to groups because right now very few chairs are doing a 
proper job of tracking the IP on public contributions well. It would 
help decrease IP risk.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 20 March 2014 11:14:12 UTC