isabella232 / wg-effectiveness

Working Group effectiveness Task Force

New to this repo? Feel free to comment on and add issues. Want to join the group? Email [email protected]. Any W3C Group Chairs, Participants, Invited Experts and Members are welcome to join!

Working Group Effectiveness Task Force

Monthly call time 2pm UTC second Friday of the month. Natasha Rooney chairs.

The Working Group Effectiveness Task Force is a W3C AB organised task force which aims to assess and work on solutions to improve working group effectiveness in W3C working groups.

The Task Force was set up after the assessment of some working groups which, although producing well used technologies, were not able to complete their chartered specifications on time. In response, the Common Standards Issues document was created, which aimed to help working groups identify issues affecting their progress, and help them solve these. The creation of the Common Standards Issues document lead to the creation of this Task Force.

Task Force Members

dontcallmedom, torgo, astearns, plehegar (team contact), nrooney (chair), jeffjaffe, marcoscaceres, Paul Cotton, Wendy Seltzer, Leonie Watson, Tzviya Siegman.

Outcomes

The group has agreed to work on the current outcomes. We have a number of outcomes, so a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 has been agreed.

Completed Documents

The Task Force has discussed what makes a working group effective and created a document to address this (possibly unanswerable!) question. The attendee roles within a working group document was also created, to indentify the various roles participants play in W3C groups (a non exhaustive list). Identifying these allows the Task Force to give advice and create solutions which allow all working group attendees to contribute to successful working groups.

[Chair Train] Chair Guidance and Sessions

Chair sessions including dedicated breakout sessions at TPAC which can be both information giving and sharing sessions. Task Force members can inform chairs as to the new available tools and information. Chairs can share information on what has and has not worked for them in their respective groups. TPAC usuaully has a chairs' breakfast presentation, in which the Task Force can present its findings. At TPAC 2017 it transpired that whilst finding chair training useful, chairs would prefer a buddy process, easy to find information, and sharing chairing responsibilities more useful.

Buddy Process

In TPAC 2017 there was a huge support from chairs for a Buddy System. We're beginning to flesh out this idea in the Buddy System. Please leave your thoughs for this in Issue #43.

Invigorating the Chair Mailing List

The Task Force is attempting to make the chair mailing a list a more useful tools for chairs to give advice, ask questions and share experiences. If you're a chair or task force member please feel free to start a new topic on the chair mailing list, or respond to already sent related mails.

Co-Chairs

A number of standards bodies operate a two-chair system for working groups. This allows a chair flexibiltiy, and a sharing of responsibilities. It also takes pressure off the team contact. The Task Force is discussing whether this would work for W3C.

[Guide] Updated /guide (Easy to Read and Access Information for New and Existing Attendees)

Updated guidance and information in an easy to find and access location for chairs, participants and implementers in how to work effectively in working groups. This information also needs regular assessing and updating as necessary. Currenly much of this information can be found in The Art of Consensus: A Guidebook for W3C Group Chairs and Participants, this needs to be re-organised, redeisgned and must include:

• information on how to effectively use tools
  • including the effective use of GitHub
• information for chairs, participants, implementers
• information on testing
• information for new chairs and new attendees on how to get started within W3C (perhaps including welcome emails and welcome pack)
• updated look and feel - ask team who work on W3C spec design

Currently the Task Force is working on an Information Architecture for the Guide in the W3C Guide Github Repo

The Task Force is also discussing whether to align Working Group homepages to be consistent, aiding new and existing participants to navigate W3C Working Groups in a much easier way.

[Testing] Testing

Testing has become an essential part of standards development, but it's taking a while for groups to get started with building testing into their standards development flow. The Task Force is working on the following:

• Process: Currently "implemenations" are written into the process but not "Testing", even though they are both arguably as important as each other in standards development. The discussion on whether to include this is the W3C Process has moved to the W3C Process Github Repo.
• Videos: many W3C Working Group chairs and participants agree that Testing is extremely important, but the big problem is how to get started. Some Task Force members are working on introductory videos on how to get started with testing, to get more people up and running faster.
• Others: here are some other ideas we have for testing:
  • Adding Test Details into /Guide: Detail types of tests that are required (e.g. interoperability, stress tests, security tests, etc)
  • No Tests No Merge should become a GitHub rule for our tools / github related outputs
  • Possible ombudspeople for testing.

[CSI] Common Standards Issues Document and Triage Process

The Task Force are continuing work on the Common Standards Issues Document. This will be presented to the AC at AC2018.

[Ombudspeople] Ombudspeople for Working Group Effectiveness with Guidelines for Escalation

W3C currently has team contacts who can be approached with issues related to working group effectivness. This team should be reviewed (possibly adding some non team contacts) and promoted within the W3C. The team should have guidelines on what happens when issues need to be escalated. The task force will need to work on a flow.

Links to current chair/team resources:

See Current Working Group Resources.