Re: New SVG WG Charter

*Participation Commitments*

Re Doug's draft charter for the SVG WG 2016/2017. [1]

Section 4 of the new draft charter states

To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 6 or more active
participants for its duration, including representatives from the key
implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for
each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are
expected to contribute half of a day per week towards the Working Group.
There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.


We really need commitments from member organizations, particularly user
agent and authoring tool implementors, to support the test suite
development, in coordination with active work on building SVG 2
implementations.  A half-day per week for editors and testing leads is a
very low bar considering how much work needs to be done, but I'm still not
convinced it will be met.

For comparison, the equivalent section of the existing charter is [2]

To be successful, The group is expected to have 7 or more active
participants for its duration. Effective participation is expected to
consume one work day per week for each participant; two days per week for
editors. The group allocates also the necessary resources for building Test
Suites.


For the past 7 months, the group was nowhere near meeting this success
criteria.  Nikos has put in a lot of time to make up for that, but it is
not reasonable to expect Canon/CISRA to continue that level of support when
their business interest in SVG is negligible.  Tavmjong & I have invested
huge amounts of unpaid volunteer work, but I for one cannot afford to do
that & have already let the other active editors know that I will not be
doing so in the future.  Meanwhile, the W3C has already cut Doug's hours
because of a lack of activity & involvement from member organizations.

If other changes to the charter or work processes could help increase
involvement (e.g., having fewer, longer telcons, having more or fewer face
to face meetings, defining more modularized deliverables that can be
delegated to specific people/organizations), this would be the time to
discuss that.

I'd also strongly encourage member reps to consider & discuss within their
companies, whether they as individuals are the best contributors to this
group.  Over the past year, there are a few implementers (who work for
member orgs or contribute to their open source software) who have been
active on the GitHub issue discussion or mailing list, but who aren't the
official SVG WG reps.  Meanwhile, the official reps from those same orgs
have not been active at all.

[1]: *https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/svg-2016.html#participation
<https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/svg-2016.html#participation>*

[2]: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/2014/new-charter#participation