Revising W3C Process Community Group Teleconference -- 09 Sep 2014

<trackbot> Date: 09 September 2014

<SteveZ_> Unless Chaals is on the call, there does not seem to be much point in having a meeting because the open actions are primarly his

<SteveZ_> Jeff said he may miss the meeting

<SteveZ_> I will wait for 2.5 minutes more than quit

<Dsinger_> Ok, Steve and Dave on the phone, who else? Do we have an effective call?

<chaals> [Some idiot from Iberdrola thought they have the right to visit a house and demand documents from anyone they find there, and needed disabusing of the notion]

<Dsinger_> 3 is very small

<chaals> trackbot, start meeting

<trackbot> Meeting: Revising W3C Process Community Group Teleconference

<trackbot> Date: 09 September 2014

<scribe> scribe: timeless

[ Discussion about chaals needing to review the previous two meetings' minutes ]

CMN: I will review the minutes and my Action items. I hope to produce a new draft later tonight.
... want to remove coordination-groups

… I will then propose removing "Good Standing requirements", "Coordination Groups" (since I believe they are redundant with working groups) from the document.

Dsinger_: when is good standing used?

chaals: it's used for voting and attendance

Dsinger_: is it ever used?

SteveZ_: history on good standing
... we were told by Oracle
... Oracle bought SUN
... unless you had a rule for
... people who don't stay up on issues
... cause discussion on issues to bog down
... because you'd redo the conversations you already had
... so unless you had been involved in the discussions leading up to vote
... you shouldn't be involved in the vote
... It was used in XSL discussions / votes
... but XSL used Consensus voting instead of majority voting
... it's not clear to me that it served a useful purpose
... it might have served a useful purpose in HTML discussions
... but that's another ball game

<chaals> Timeless: I was involved in a recent mobile group which suffered from people coming in and revisiting issues because people hadn't attended meetings where issues were discussed. I wished we had enforced a good standing policy.

<chaals> … A process is useful but it requires someone to actively ensure that it is used. When it is rarely used people are not aware of it or how it works.

<chaals> … If we were to keep it we should encourage chairs to be aware of the when/how/why and encourage them to use it. Otherwise we should drop it.

<chaals> … The group I talked about had many attendees and significant churn, so people would come in and talk about old issues that had already been closed (more than once)

SteveZ_: one reason to drop it is
... too few chairs wanted to enforce it
... some of the User Members couldn't participate on a regular basis
... and didn't want their managers to see them as not-in-good-standing in the working group
... the term became a perjorative
... the main value of user members is they gave you actual feedback of whether they're working or not

Dsinger_: i think it's fine to enforce it if

DSinger: we can enforce it if we give people time to get into good standing

ZZ: we could change the wording "voting status"

SteveZ_: a lot of groups have gone away from decisions by voting

chaals: there are groups like webapps that explicitly refuse to use good-standing
... but there are groups that are/could
... choose to insert it into their charter

<Dsinger_> I can certainly think of fields where uninformed people could be problematic

chaals: but they should enforce it both fairly and uniformly

SteveZ_: i agree with you
... i hear you saying that we could define something /like/ good standing in the process document
... and say "there's an option to include this in the charter", but it's not a requirement

chaals: no. that's not what i'm saying
... i'm saying "groups may in their charter have additional rules for eligibility to vote/attend meetings/and the like"
... "... such rules should be uniformly enforced."

SteveZ_: we have "the charters may include additional material not in conflict with this document"
... we have examples there

<Dsinger_> I think it would be more helpful to document it and make it optional

SteveZ_: we could say that "if you have such rules, they should be as if they are in this document"

chaals: documenting rules effectively is a fools errand

Dsinger_: we should provide enough text that if a group wants to have one
... i think we should have more than a couple of sentences

chaals: i'll make a proposal to the ML

SteveZ_: i want to repeat one thing timeless said
... the problem he's concerned about
... and the problem that originally prompted it
... was note voting
... but people distracting discussion because they weren't paying attention

timeless: yes

SteveZ_: having rules to allow the chair to declare out-of-order
... for discussion would make more sense

chaals: the problem that timeless identified
... is that new people come into a group and raise an issue
... this is tricky because
... there are a number of cases, where one person raises an issue
... they're shouted down
... they leave the group in discust
... another person joins the group, raises the issue, they're shouted down, they leave the group in discust
... there are a number of examples of this
... good-standing isn't the right tool
... an issue tracker is a better tool

Dsinger_: i agree

SteveZ_: it isn't immediately clear to me that good standing is needed

Dsinger_: good standing is trying to avoid the issue where you have a number of people who aren't up to speed on the group, they don't understand the history/context
... the other example is technical groups where you don't want people who don't understand the subject-matter
... security/crypto groups
... but people can maintain good standing, and it doesn't help you there
... people can be disruptive
... the solution is firm chairing and issue tracking

<Zakim> timeless, you wanted to say that there were minutes and resolutions and iirc an issue tracker

SteveZ_: chaals is working on his action items
... i'm working on mine

AOB

Dsinger_: should we have had the whatwg flare up on the w3process list

chaals: unless someone wants to blacklist whatwg specs a-priori
... i don't think there's anything to do

SteveZ_: Dsinger_, i agree with you
... chaals has twice said he didn't think this was the right place

Dsinger_: i raised the same question "i'm not sure what this discussion is doing here"

timeless: +1

SteveZ_: i don't know what ArtB wanted
... i read through the messages, i still don't know
... chaals, is it ok for me to say "i don't know why this discussion is going on here"
... the problem is that i don't think there's another list

chaals: i was at a loss to find any relevance to the continuation of the thread

SteveZ_: do we run the risk of closing issue-124 at this meeting

<Dsinger_> Issue-124?

<trackbot> Issue-124 -- Normative Reference policy should explicitly black list WHATWG specs -- raised

<trackbot> http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/124

SteveZ_: that ArtB gets upset?
... i'd like to close it as irrelevant to the process

<Zakim> timeless, you wanted to say i think the concern is that it was in private

chaals: you can say that the group won't address this

SteveZ_: i'll wait until next week

DSinger: raising inflammatory issues isn't helpful

SteveZ_: no action
... unless there's something else
... i'd propose we adjourn

[ thanks to timeless for scribing ]

[ There is no process call next week due to a conflict with AB meeting ]

trackbot, end meeting

- DRAFT -

Revising W3C Process Community Group Teleconference

09 Sep 2014

Attendees

Contents

AOB

Summary of Action Items

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