TAG Contributor Policies
copyright · document roles
This document describes the contributor and copyright policies
associated with products of the W3C Technical
Architecture Group.
TAG participants who are not employees of a W3C Member
organization must agree to the W3C invited expert
and collaborators agreement (per
section 4.2.3 of the W3C Process Document).
Technical reports published by the TAG will bear the following
copyright notice:
Copyright
© 2002 W3C (MIT, INRIA, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C
liability,
trademark,
document
use and software
licensing rules apply.
TAG participants who are not willing to contribute under these
terms must refrain from doing so and notify the Chair as to the
reason why.
Note: Patent disclosures must be made by TAG
participants as discussed on the TAG
patent disclosure page.
The TAG charter sets expectations
that all TAG participants are expected to contribute to
Architectural Recommendations:
W3C Members are encouraged to nominate individuals who: ...[a]re
available to spend approximately 25% percent of their time writing
and resolving issues.
This document describes three levels of contribution towards
written work: Editor, Author, and Contributor.
- Editor
- Editors are responsible for reflecting the proposals and
consensus of the WG within the specification. From section
5.2 of the W3C Process Document, "Every technical report on the
Recommendation track is edited by one or more editors appointed by
a Working Group Chair. It is the responsibility of these editors to
ensure that the decisions of the group are correctly reflected in
subsequent drafts of the technical report. Editors are not required
to be part of the Team."
- Author
- Authors by their own initiative or through commitments to the
Chair make substantive contributions that are included within a
specification. Frequently an author will make and write a proposal
that becomes the basis of a section of the specification. Criteria
for authorship are the expressed interest (agreed to by the Chair)
to be listed as an author and the substance and quality of
contributions. The Chair looks at the consistency of participation,
the willingness to take action items, and how much "authoring" the
TAG participant actually accomplished. These criteria are somewhat
relative in that, if this role is designated, the Chair wishes to
list the top handful of people that consistently plugged away on
the work and to avoid a list of names that occupies the first two
pages of the specification. Where the number of authors/editors are
small, the Author and Editor roles are frequently collapsed into
the Editor designation. Where there are may authors, the role will
be a specified subset of the Contributor designation which is an
Appendix to the specification.
- Contributor
- Contributors are the many important TAG participants or non-TAG
commenters who provide the ideas, comments, feedback and
implementation experience that make the specification meaningful.
Criteria for the contributor role are an expressed interest to be
listed as a contributor to the document and the quality of
contributions, as determined by the Chair. The assessment of
quality is based on the consistency of participation on the email
list, participation in teleconferences and face-to-face meetings as
appropriate, and a responsiveness to open TAG issues. In reality,
this criteria are fairly relaxed in that the Chair wishes to
include all of those that helped, while not weakening that
acknowledgement through the inclusion of individuals who
contributed only slightly. Contributors are listed as an appendix
to the specification.
W3C does not have a clear process for defining the role of
author as it appears on a W3C technical report. It has become clear
through experience that this distinction is sometimes a useful one
within a Working Group. In general, only the document editors are
listed on the W3C Technical Reports
page. In deciding attribution, the Chair will consider a final
formulation that is reasonably terse but as fair as possible to all
involved.
In the event that a TAG participant discontinues participation
in one of the roles above, the Chair has the option of changing or
removing acknowledgment Criteria for removal include duration and
reason of absence, as well as the weight of previous contributions
to the present draft. The goal is to give credit where credit is
due, but not to carry forward attributions that are no longer
relevant.
Ian Jacobs
This document draws heavily on the XML Signature Working Group
Contributor policy, by Joseph Reagle and Donald Eastlake
III
Last revised: $Date: 2002/01/20 23:17:01 $