Status of this Document: This proposal has been obsoleted. The W3C Recommendation Track provides means to maintain W3C Recommendations, as long as we have an associated Working Group to do the maintenance, or leave it in the W3C Team for non-substantive errata.
Note: This process makes use of a proposal from the new standards task force that involves the creation of lightweight community groups.
The community (or W3C staff) creates a Community Group to manage maintenance of a Recommendation. W3C Working Groups will no longer do maintenance. This can be discussed; there may be some WGs that want to manage errata until they close.
The Community Group will allow public participation without fee. The Community Group may, of course, be populated by the participants of the Working Group that produced the Recommendation (indeed, that is a very good thing).
The Community Group is self-governing. It persists indefinitely.
The Community Group chooses Errata Managers who have write access to the site and who help to log errata. (People may wish to use tools offsite, but that should be discouraged, and the data should routinely be archived at w3.org.). W3M may choose to assign staff as Errata Managers, but their responsibilities are still to be confirmed through the processes chosen by the Community Group.
The Community Group establishes a process for approving corrections. It should be consensus-based. (I expect we will provide straw-polling tools to assist in this process.) Strong objections to proposed corrections must be noted along with the corrections chosen by the Community Group.
At some point, the Community Group decides that it wishes to fold errata normatively into a new edition of a specification.
The review committee, working with the Community Group, manages incoming comments and making edits. People may register formal objections to changes.
Once comments have been processed, the review committee sends a transition request to Recommendation, including documentation of changes since PER and any Formal Objections.
The Director either approves the request or publishes rationale for rejecting it. If approved, the Editor works with the Comm Team and Webmaster to publish and announce the revised Recommendation.
That seems unlikely. We'll deal with it if it happens.
What is more likely is that someone will object to changes within a single Community Group.
@@To be completed with information about possible need for staff oversight.
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