Re: Proposed Activity Proposal, Charter

On Friday 17 August 2001 07:21, Mike Just wrote:
> From our discussions, I believe that the date for last call (Jan 2002) was
> chosen based at least in part on W3C process requirements.  The official
> W3C working group is expected to be established in October (approximately 8
> weeks after submission of the Activity Proposal) and then 3 months
> (required?) till the Last Call.  I suspect though that there would be W3C
> resistance to moving to last call only one month after the official working
> group was formed.

Last call [1] is a statement that the WG feels it has met all its obligations
and requirements (from a charter and requirements document) and this is the
last chance for the broader community to comment at that level, as future
business will be focussed on fixing/implementing what's already specified.
One then needs to go other WGs over the head so they'll take notice. Then one
needs to answer the feedback that comes back and iterate.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010719/tr.html#last-call

If the WG can do that satisfy its charter obligations and requirements for
that deliverable in a month, so be it. (I don't think it likely though.)

However, this begs the questions of the requirements document. If you have no
requirements document, the broader community might complain they never even
understood and didn't have a chance to participate or contribute what they
thought needs to be done. However, I believe that if there's agreement that
the requirement is to *not* specify any additional functionality, only to
focus, modularize, and clean-up what's already specified, if that's stated in
the charter I'm not convinced one needs a completely different requirements
document -- or it's a simple one paragraph document! The requirements
document is necessary for communicating to the broader world, being focussed,
and preventing feature creep and eternal kibitzing. If these goals can be
satisfied otherwise, I personally am not a stickler. However, others on the
Team might disagree. I expect this would be one of those things the
Director/Team would discuss before sending it out AC review, so I recommend
specifying a requirements document and 3 month before last call period, but
expressing your intent as clearly as possible and then the Team will try to
figure out how to satisfy that best in the process in a consistent manner as
other WGs.

Received on Friday, 17 August 2001 09:21:59 UTC