w3c / cg-charter

Charter template for W3C Community and Business Groups

cg-charter

Charter template for W3C Community and Business Groups

To create a markdown version, please use a markdown-translator (available on the Web).

Questions? Please contact [email protected].

cg-charter's Issues

What license is this charter text available under?

I assume it's the W3C Software and Document License, but AFAICT nothing spells that out.

Add a CG Charter template for a CG controlled by a parent WG?

Just in case there is interest in this, wanted to put this somewhere.
https://wayneca.github.io/CGCharterWGOwned/CGCharterWGOwned.html

This is the usual CG template changed so that the scope is the scope under the current charter of the parent WG and anything the parent WG explicitly asks the CG to investigate. The CG can only create specs that are in the CG Charter. The parent WG writes and modifies associated CG Charter and selects the CG Chairs, so controls the associated CG. I'll paste in the text for this charter in comment below, in case it winds up removed from the repo the link above points to. (assuming this Issue can just be closed now - just recording it so at some later time it can be used if anyone is interested)

Use semantic line breaks in the template text

Semantic line breaks make it easier to keep track of edits to prose text, when using git diff and similar tools.

If there were clear line breaks before and after each sentence or major phrase in the template, it would be easy to detect any added or removed phrases in a draft charter.

As an example, this paragraph:

    <p>
      Community Group participants agree to make all contributions in the
      GitHub repo the group is using for the particular document. This may be
      in the form of a pull request (preferred), by raising an issue, or by
      adding a comment to an existing issue.
    </p>

could look like this with semantic breaks

    <p>
      Community Group participants agree to make all contributions
      in the GitHub repo the group is using for the particular document.
      This may be
      in the form of a pull request (preferred),
      by raising an issue,
      or
      by adding a comment to an existing issue.
    </p>

With this structure, edits to a single item in the list, or to the description of the repo location,
can often be isolated to a single line in the source code

Garbage characters

The template has

(marked with �{TBD�)

That looks like UTF-8 bytes treated as Latin-1 bytes and the resulting characters re-encoded as UTF-8.

RFC 2777 was obsoleted by RFC 3797

the Chair Selection section should probably be updated to reflect this.

repeated use of voting

I'm concerned that including multiple voting processes in the sample Community Group charter is encouraging many new groups by default to adopt voting as their decision-making process, and discouraging use of consensus or the W3C Process.

Among the many reasons that Internet standard-setting processes typically don't rely on voting, one is that identifying a closed list of organizations is non-obvious, and this particularly applies to Community Groups where there isn't a W3C Membership requirement. Do we want Community Groups to become frequent calls for "sign up for an account and click join this group just so you can have another vote on this thing"? Another is that stakeholders may not be similarly represented in terms of the number of formal organizations that they have involved.

Also, many groups seem to be copy/pasting the process step of "any 5 organizations at any time can call for a 5-week election". I don't know that this has already been used as a disruptive mechanism, but it seems extremely ripe for it. Since the Community Development Lead is suggested as helping in those cases, maybe it would just be easier to have an appeal to the Community Development Lead possible in cases where the chairs are directly ignoring the consensus of the group to change the chairs.