W3C

W3C EPUB 3 Community Group Charter

Mission

The mission of the EPUB 3 Community Group (“EPUB 3 CG”) is to provide a forum for ongoing technical development of EPUB 3 and related extension specifications and ancillary deliverables.

Scope

The EPUB 3 CG shall develop future revisions to, and maintenance of, EPUB 3 and extension modules. In scope are follow-on work from EPUB 3.1 and its constituent elements including EPUB Accessibility, as well as all EPUB 3 extension modules previously developed by IDPF including  EPUB for Education profile and EPUB for Education Structural Semantics, EPUB Distributable Objects, Open Annotations in EPUB, EPUB Scriptable Components, EPUB Scriptable Components Packaging and Integration, EPUB Indexes, EPUB Dictionaries and Glossaries, EPUB Multiple-Rendition Publications, EPUB Previews, and EPUB Region-Based Navigation.

The EPUB 3 CG shall also undertake work on ancillary deliverables around EPUB 3 as appropriate, some of which work may be in collaboration with other organizations. In scope initially are EPUBCheck, the  EPUB 3 Reading System Test Suite, and the EPUB 3 Samples repository.

Work on any future major revision of EPUB, e.g. an EPUB 4, is initially out of scope on the presumption that this will be taken up by a new W3C WG as a W3C Recommendation Track activity. The EPUB 3 CG will coordinate its work with such new WG, and meanwhile with the existing W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group (DPUB IG).

Coordination with the publishing industry regarding requirements and priorities for ongoing EPUB 3 development will be delegated to the W3C Publishing Business Group (BG).

Engagement with other W3C WGs, e.g. CSS, may be undertaken as necessary for in-scope work.

Process

For consistency with EPUB 3 development to date, and to make it clear that EPUB 3 work in this CG is not Recommendation-track work according to the full W3C Process, the expectation is that historical IDPF designations for specification maturity shall be utilized (“Public Draft”, “Proposed Specification”, “Recommended Specification”, and “Informational Document”).

In order to ensure coordination and involvement of all stakeholders, the EPUB 3 CG will publish specifications, at any stage other than Editors Drafts, only upon receiving the explicit approval of the Publishing BG or its Steering Committee.

The EPUB 3 CG will adhere as much as practical to the W3C Process Document section 3.3 and W3C tradition by seeking to make decisions that reflect a consensus.

Participation

The EPUB 3 Community Group is open to all interested parties.

Participants should expect to participate in regular (up to weekly frequency) meetings as well as email and other electronic communication and collaboration means. Several hours per week of time commitment is expected to be a minimum for effective participation.

Communication

The Publishing BG will operate via the public mailing list public-epub3@w3.org [archive], and on github.

This charter may be amended at any time by consensus, or lacking consensus a simple majority vote, of EPUB 3 CG participants subject to the approval of the W3C Publishing BG.

Community and Business Group Process and Patent Policy

The group operates under the Community and Business Group Process. Terms of this charter that conflict with those of the Community and Business Group Process are void.

As with other Community Groups, W3C seeks organizational licensing commitments under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA) (Proposals in this Community Group charter are applicable "Specification" in the CLA). When people request to participate without representing their organization’s legal interests, W3C will in general approve those requests for this group with the following understanding: W3C will seek and expect an organizational commitment under the CLA starting with the individual’s first request to make a contribution to a group deliverable. The section on Contribution Mechanics describes how W3C expects to monitor these contribution requests.

NOTE: all existing EPUB 3 specifications were developed under a different IP Policy, that of the IDPF. That policy in general resulted in only RAND (“Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory”) licensing commitments by contributors, rather than RF (“Royalty Free) licensing commitments.  and therefore the revisions to such existing specifications cannot be presumed to have RF status. While this group generally seeks contributions according to the W3C policy (i.e. RF), on a case-by-case basis this group may make exceptions given the RAND basis of the existing specifications that are in scope for work in this group.

Contribution Mechanics

Community Group participants agree to make contributions in the GitHub repo for the project that they are interested in. This may be in the form of a pull request (preferred), by raising an issue, or by adding a comment to an existing issue.

Specifications created for proposals in the Community Group must use the W3C Software and Document License.
All Github repositories attached to the Community Group must contain a copy of the CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE files.
Note: this CG will not use a contrib mailing list for contributions since all contributions will be tracked via Github mechanisms (e.g. pull requests).

Chair Selection


The initial Chairs are Rachel Comerford (Macmillan Higher Education) and Dave Cramer (Hachette Livre).

Participants in this group choose their Chair(s) and can replace their Chair(s)at any time using whatever means they prefer, subject to the consent of the W3C Publishing BG.


      Change history:

      $Log: EPUB3CGcharter.html,v $
      Revision 1.8  2018/12/19 09:47:55  ivan
      github reference and chairs added

      Revision 1.6  2017/02/10 16:02:33  swick
      Add links to mailing list and archive

      Revision 1.5  2017/02/07 13:14:44  swick
      Add W3C base style

      Revision 1.4  2017/02/07 13:11:09  swick
      Add link to the CG home
    

Updated $Date: 2018/12/19 09:47:55 $