Process CG

Informal Chat

cpn raises w3c/w3process#623 (comment)

florian: wanted to have broad council collectively rather than neutral individuals, because truly neutral is not real
… some people will be more involved than others, or leaning one direction or another, but short of excluding everyone no real way to get people who aren't involved
… the set of people who are promotor or objector is not clear [gives examples]

<Zakim> nigel, you wanted to react to a previous speaker to answer the question about Who Is the Promoter

florian: seemed intractable to get rid of people who might have bias, so decided to have more biases so collectively they cancel out

nigel: I think gap in process atm, for FO councils arising from AC reviews
… Council's role must be to come to an assessment specifically when a chair decides to carry a group decision forward in the presence of objections
… I think that should be true as well for AC
… AC has a chair (well, it should)
… and the chair's job should be, in the case of AC review where there are objections, to do an initial step of trying to resolve those objections
… that should be initial phase before it hits Council, make sure ppl talk to each other properly
… in the TTML case, first thing Council tried to do was that

cwilso: first, that's not the job of the chair, that's the job of the Team Contact
… they've already done the initial attempt to resolve objection
… The reasoning behind not removing a lot of potential members of Council is because many of us have multiple roles, and simply sorting us into "objector" or "not objector"
… I don't author the majority of the objections from Google. Because AC rep, I submit them all. I may not be the source, might be, but that's a different role
… Secondly, we would lose entire classes of input that we think are important to have balanced view on Council
… e.g. in TTML all, we would have removed every browser vendor, because we all objected at one point or another

<Zakim> nigel, you wanted to talk about the parties too

nigel: I don't think that the Team Contact thinks its their job to do that first step, I do think the chair, should asses whether there's consensus and declare decision
… but other thing about losing input is, I think there should be, by default the chair should be invited to talk to the Council, or talk with Council, before they do their deliberation
… before their delierations
… they shoudl be present
… When it comes to deliberations, they should go away
… even if either of them is a member of the Council
… if it turns out lots of other group have similar opinions, that's their job, that's why they're in that role

<Zakim> plh, you wanted to mention we need folks who understand the issues

plh: To what florian said earlier to the original question
… another reason we didn't have the recusal mandatory was because we are removing potential good expertise
… if you get ppl who are not following the isseu, you asking anyone with understanding of issue to leave
… and everyone else has to ramp up from nothing, and it's a harder mountain to climb

plh: It is Team Contact role to help find consensus
… at my advice, Team Contacts are working with WG to do that
… in your case, Nigel, you were trying to do work in trying to find consensus
… my advice to Atsuchi was to work with you on this
… if you had stopped trying, I would tell Atsuchi to do it
… We tried, we failed, the questions were too deep into W3C topics
… The Council thought there would be an answer, and failed
… the underlying issues were too deep
… We still needed the Council to step in

florian: In general Team Contact and Chair should try to find consensus
… after FO, even under TimBL, Team is supposed to try to find consensus
… and Council Process includes that: Team works with objector and WG to find a solution
… sometimes it works, sometimes not, sometimes done well, sometimes not, but there's absolutely such an expectation
… that this will happen before getting to the Council
… Wrt Chair and Objector should be heard, would agree in general with some nuance
… In first Council we did exactly that. We interviewed all involved.
… Then we built a backlog, mostly starting late, and when you start late, no matter what you do you're late already
… so we felt a need to not waste time
… to the extent that the Team Report seems to cover everything, and given how hard it is to schedule a meeting for 20 ppl, given we feel we understand the issue we skip that interviewing step
… if we were uncertain, the interview
… i think if we were not so late at the start, we would interview more often
… We've been able to resolve several FOs in a single Council meeting, and that could not be done if we had to do interviews

florian: As for recusals etc., another thing that played into this is that we had run a bunch of Councils without removing anyone
… and found the ppl that we might have removed to not be a disrupting factor on the Council
… to not try to pull things in their direction
… to have a sufficient level of discretion that they share their viewpoint but not drag the group in that direction
… this gave comfort to ppl who were uncertain
… and the idea that we would benefit more from their presence seemed to be supported by experience

cpn: That's interesting, creates imbalance of maybe objector has a voice in the group and chair doesn't, has to rely on Team Contact and Team Report
… on the "no party should be objector and adjudicator", Chris in your case you're representing a large org with many participants
… for a smaller org the AC rep would have a conversation with a colleague and theyd' come to a unified posiiton, so there wouldn't be such a distinction between the AC rep view and the objection
… the risk to the Council setup is that we create this perception that there are biases
… and that the Council deliberations are not as reliable as they might be
… so that's the reason we're suggesting that the AC rep that puts in the objection perhaps should be part of the Council
… in terms of numbers, the numbers in practice I would expect to be small, removing 2-3 out of 20 doesn't significantly reduce
… Other point was about losing expertise, could imagine another composition involving e.g. chairs of other WGs that have domain experience
… so different models could be looked at for formation of the Council

<Zakim> cwilso, you wanted to react to cpn

cwilso: For me, it was a recognition that it's imposible to remove bias
… even with ideas you suggest, e.g. inviting chairs -- who chooses who gets in the room?
… you might claim the wrong set of ppl in the room either way
… the whole thing about removing the objectors was odd because it would have weird side-effects that wouldn't help
… for example, if we implement policy that parties cannot be part of Council, I would immediately stop filing anything myself, and instead ask our alternate AC rep to do the filing
… Realistically, when I walk into Council, I try to drop as many biases as possible
… though realistically, I still work for a browser vendor etc.
… If there's truly an issue of "this person cannot be objective", they can be removed
… We have removed from Councils before, even in the few experiments that we have run
… I expect this to be rare.

<Zakim> plh, you wanted to mention webshare

cwilso: I expect anyone who is on TAG or AB should be able to be objective and helpful rather than biased and unhelpful

plh: Switching topics, if Team Contact is trying to find consensus, sometimes we just rely on the group
… didn't work for TTML, but it did work on webshare
… we got an objection from Mozilla, and I relied on Marcos to enter into a direct dialog with mozilla to find consensus, and they succeeded
… even though it's role of Team Contact, the Team Contact didn't have to do much because the WG was able to resolve directly with objector
… Team is here to help, to look for consensus. If community can do without our help that's great. We don't have to be in the middle of everything.

plh: On different compositions, there are other ways to compose a Council. The number of conversations we had over past 3-4 years... I don't think we can claim this is the ideal composition, but every other proposal we considered was worse than this one.
… replacing TimBl is not easy
… We do see this is the first attempt to replace TimBl, don't expect to get it right each time, still trying to get it right

plh: One thing we haven't done is transparency of votes. We stayed away from that because if we do move to transparency, it may make some ppl in the TAG and AB to recuse just because their vote to be on the record and be exposed
… this would not be a problem in TTML, if you asked Council to address objections in [othertopic], many members would step down

<Zakim> florian, you wanted to react to plh

florian: That said, every Council so far has reached their decision by consensus, so there was not a vote, every decision was made with zero opposition, and this is documented in the report
… if we failed to reach consensus, we would decide by vote, and that fact would be disclosed

<csarven> Pardon if I'm interrupting the message flow above, is this meeting invite-only to some folks with certain roles at W3C or can any one (Member or non-Member may join) the call?

<Zakim> nigel, you wanted to explain more why parties to the FO should be absent from deliberations

nigel: I get point about the different views, but that misses the main point of why they shouldn't be part
… which is not just about coming to fair and objective decisions in the best interest of the Web and W3C
… but about being *seen* as fair, which is more important
… as a thought experiment, taking what Florian explained to us, if there was a vote and one vote changed the decision

<csarven> fantasai: Thank you but it seems "Instructions are restricted to W3C users with Member access." on the event page. Thanks though. I wanted to listen-in only. I'll follow the minutes here :)

nigel: that would not be fair, because objector/decider was present
… everyone looking at that externally would think, "that's not fair"
… Coming back to what cwilso was saying earlier, having someone else filing objections
… from external perspective, even though you might be on the AB/TAG as an individual (thus without official affiliation), everyone knows you're affiliated with Google
… so I would count all parts of the org the same

<csarven> plh Thanks :)

fantasai: I think we the Council should be tracking a log, and the Guide shoudl recommend this

<Zakim> cwilso, you wanted to respond to "everybody knows my actual affiliation"

fantasai: with times of what happened and when, so that delays can be understood
… and potentially dealt with better

cwilso: Wrt Council removal etc. This isn't a perfect solution, but every other solution has its own consequences
… for example, "everyone knows my actual affiilation", that means that Google does not get any representation, because *someone* at Google would have bias on any given issue
… and I have to represent Google as their AC represent
… but that's not the same as, can I function objectively as a member of the Council ... Honestly, I think the biggest things that are causing distress are that we don't currently automatically in some way engage the parties to whom are being objected to (typically WG chairs)
... we should figure out how to do that
... We should make sure this doesn't turn into back and forth argument deliberations, but having you show up to part of Council was very useful, and we should do more of that
... I think the more we give transparency to Council proceedings the better, but it does make it difficult to be real in the Coucil meetings
... I have to recognize when I am speaking in something that can be quoted publicly in a news article vs. deliberations that two dozen ppl have access to

cwilso: In all the Councils I've been part of, those who might be quesitonable, have typically removed themselves from impacting the decisions

florian: I agree

nigel: I don't think it does mean that Google representation woudl be denied. If you're saying AC rep or AC reps delegate, two ppl can file on behalf of Google
... true for AC, but in the case of any other group, there's already view of Google expressed
... so nobody's view is denied for sake of appearance

cwilso: Everyone at W3C gets a vote to elect ppl to AB and TAG
... point of STV is to point that the broadest diversity of opinions are somehow represented in the bodies
... I have my own issues with that the STV system
... but we do have that effect if everyone votes
... but if we start removing ppl from the Council, then we don't have that anymore
... If we systematically come up with something that says, if Google files an objection cwilso is removed from Council
... in charters, I drive review of them, but views are sourced internally, but I'm the one who has to sign off on that as the AC rep
... But then we would be explicitly saing, if you're AC rep, if your company files objections you wont be able to be on the Council
... whether you were source of that objection or not, whether it's your bias or someone else's
... we have to trade off the engagement vs diversity
... I have objected to charters literally because they didn't put an end date
... didn't mean that I thought the work should not go forward
... we should properly make charters
... but this builds up, and gives impression that I object to things a lot
... we would end up removing people systematically in ways that would have unintended conseuqences
... biggest one is, yes, the browser vendors have a strong desire that implementations are really important for interop in standards
... Apple and Mozilla have been strong in objecting to situations that don't adhere to that
... we could change that, but currently it's a principle of W3C, that interop is important to W3C

florian: Is this disagreeing with viewpoint or not being sure that you understnad the viewpoint?
... we've been representing the way it is so far, but claim is not that it's perfect
... lots of variants can be considered, and everything we have considered before seemed be worse
... it's not right, but it right-er
... not is it perfect, but is it good enough
... and at this point I think it is better

nigel: Thinking about the membership, talking about a lense of representation, and lense of tranparent fairness
... another side of fairness is, how many bites of the cherry can one organization have?
... TTWG has come up a lot
... firstly, a member of the WG didn't object during the discussion of the WG, but then objected during AC review, and then was on the Council
... I'm not sure what correct number of bites of cherry is, but it feels unfair

nigel: I also want to think about outcomes
... what's the input basis of the decision of the decision the Council is making, and outcome-based repsonse
... between TTWG objection being filed and Council deliberating, there were changes made to the document
... so some ambiguity to what Council is actually ruling on
... I think the sensible thing done here, comments and objections were resolved and outcome of that, if objections still remain, that's what's being reviewed

nigel: simple uphold or reject is not enough
... Councijl should be able to say we've heard what everyone said, and we should do this third thing
... there should be some consultation process to validate that
... but I think that's something that should be opened up
... The Director has the power to do that, and the Council can't

plh: Council rules on the objections that are still standing. Changes you did to charter to satisfy some of the commenters, they're not being considered by the COuncil because not part of the objection
... then Team needs to valiate the council
... those changes not part of Council, but if the Council overrules FOs we will move forward with those changes
... Council can always say "Team didn't do enough of a job", and ask Team to do more
... and that's what happened with TTWG

florian: On giving some powers to Council beyond saying yes/no and explaining it
... I think worth exploring
... one reason we didn't, the Director had pre-existing powers to do things that he could use
... not tied to FOs
... If we want Council to be able to do that, we need to figure out what those powers are and constrain them in some way
... but we have to realize these would be new powers granted to AB+TAG, but we have to be mindful of the limits

fantasai: +1 to Nigel's points, we should continue that conversation
... we need to clarify what happens if things shift during the Council

Action Items

Discussion of things to do

• Set up a web page indexing the reports, similar to TAG Findings
• Include a time log into the TTWG report, so AC can understand what delays were and how we're addressing them in the updated Process
• Consider including the recommendation of time logs into /Guide