Re: a couple thoughts on newtrk

At 16:56 03/11/10 -0600, Dan Connolly wrote:
>Scott,
>
>regarding "3/ what other SDOs do"
>in http://www.ietf.org/ietf/03nov/newtrk.txt
>
>1. The W3C has, in many ways, recreated the 3-step
>Proposed, Draft and Full Standard process,
>with Candiate Rec, Proposed Rec, and Rec.
>That is: we found it useful/necessary to add
>Candidate Recommendation to our process as a
>signal to implementors that the design work
>was "done" to some extent. This step is new,
>so we made it optional for any group that can
>document sufficient implementation experience
>without announcing an explicit Candidate Rec
>phase. But most groups are using it now.

Yes, there are striking parallels here. But there are
also differences. An IETF WG is often disbanded once
Proposed Standards are published (the mailing list
usually lives on). A W3C WG would be considered to have
done a very bad job if they stopped at Candidate Rec.

Going to Draft takes at least 6 months; in W3C, there is
no time limit. Going to Full Standard in the IETF is often
ignored; the (numerically) major reason I have heard for
moving things to Full Standard is that something else is
trying to move to Full Standard that wants to reference
the standard in question. In W3C, moving to Recommendation
from Proposed Recommendation is in many cases a formality
(getting the official final approval from the W3C membership),
and it on average takes something around 2 months to
move from Proposed Rec to Rec.

Related to this is also the perception. I think implementers
are on average much more ready to implement and deploy on
a large scale a Proposed Standard than they are for a
Candidate Recommendation.

Regards,    Martin.



>2. The main advantage I see in W3C process these days is
>that we distinguish between decisions made by consensus
>vs. decisions made despite outstanding dissent.
>To have a chair or the IESG declare "rough consensus" when
>some party is on record as objecting doesn't help, but
>neither does giving everybody veto power.
>
>For details, see
>http://www.w3.org/2003/06/Process-20030618/policies.html#Consensus
>
>p.s. This is copied to www-archive@w3.org
>which makes it publicly available via
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/
>so feel free to forward as you see fit.
>
>
>--
>Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Monday, 10 November 2003 22:00:49 UTC