- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 01:55:25 +0100
- To: "Janet Daly" <janet@w3.org>, <www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org>, <process-issues@w3.org>
- Cc: <www-archive@w3.org>, "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>, <djweitzner@w3.org>
On 5th April 2001, an internal draft of the Patent Policy Framework document was announced to the chairs:- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2001AprJun/0003 the request for review contained words to the effect that the requestor would welcome comments from all chairs *and* Working Group members, and yet public Working Group members were not informed at that time. Is there any suitable reason for that? The issues that the PPF WD of 2001-04-05 raise were so clearly of importance to all W3C WG participants, that it absolutely defies belief that such a document was not put into the public domain earlier. Further, I think that this is a general manifestation of an underlying problem that the W3C has, in that it overassigns a level of privacy to much of its working content, and thus severely restricts the W3C from achieving it's goal of "leading the Web to its full potential". The issue has been raised by many people on many seperate occasions, and I have also received an enourmous amount of (oft' private) sympathy when confounded by the W3C's anachronistic privacy policy. When the archives for feedback comments to the W3C process document are member confidential, alarm bells start ringing. This is so much a recurring problem that I wonder how many iterations of a buerocratically inclined feedback process the hard working members, invited experts, and contributors of the W3C have to go through until things change for the better. The are many examples of W3C privacy paranoia... An excellent one that springs to mind is the recent TAG process issues. Until the heavily outspoken concerns from Aaron Swartz et al., it appeared as if TAG dealings would be conducted evenly over Team and Member confidential space. Now, the TAG operates over Member and Public space; proof of both the ignorance of the original decision of confidentiality towards just how important it is for TAG to be public, and of how public comments can work - that the W3C does listen. I hope that this email will have a similar effect, but on a wider scale. Speking as an invited expert for the W3C WAI ERT, GL and PF Working Groups, and a long time supporter of the general mission and excellent work that the W3C carries out, -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> . :Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 20:56:40 UTC