Various other options were considered,
but all were found to have more downsides than a Council-based approach.
Among the many variants discussed, the following are notable:
Finding a new Director:
Finding someone who's both capable and respected enough
to be granted this level of power over a W3C
that has a much broader scope than it did
when it was first established
seemed unlikely.
Establishing a Technical Director position:
Similar problems,
but also Formal Objections are rarely only technical.
Hire or elect a Directorate (e.g. 3 people):
Similar problems to a Technical Director,
except now you need to somewhow financially sustain these three people
in a way maintains their independence.
Just let the Team do it:
The Team doesn't have the same legitimacy as TimBl,
and doesn't derive its authority from the community, either.
Moreover, it could be biased towards maintaining sources of funding over doing the right thing.
Resolve everything by direct AC vote:
Contrary to the W3C values of consensus and finding the best path forward,
and turns every FO into a political campaign.
Legalistic approach (only Formal Objections about Process violation can be upheld):
Contrary to the W3C values of consensus and finding the best path forward.
Most FOs have both process and technical components to them.
We combined the AB (process expertise) and TAG (technical expertise),
who are both AC-elected (community legitimacy)
with the CEO (to represent the Team perspective)
to create the Council,
with the intention that this 21-person combined team would sufficiently balance itself out
to provide high quality resolution of FOs consistent with the values of W3C.
2.
Why (group-voted) dismissal rather than (self-chosen or automatic) recusal?
There are a few problems with recusals:
Self-recusal would introduce a bias
from more scrupulous people removing themselves more often,
which seems counter-productive.
Automatic exclusion or recusal of involved parties would need a definion of “involved parties”,
which is a lot harder than it sounds:
are all members in a WG who didn't object “supporters” of a proposal?
All their coworkers on the same team?
At a large company?
What about all the AC Reps who didn't object?
Is only the person who filed the objection an objecter?
What about their coworkers?
If they filed as an AC rep on behalf of their coworkers,
are they personally an objector?
What about other people who agree with the objector,
but didn't file the formal objection?
The more active participants could be seen as having an interest in everything.
Most definitions we considered ended up simultaneously feeling too narrow and too broad.
Reduced numbers mean reduced breadth and diversity,
which reduces both the abilities and the legitimacy of the Council,
which argues against harsher recusal thresholds.
Automatic exclusion or recusal of involved parties
also creates an incentive for people to back-channel their input
in order maintain their involvement in any actual Council,
which creates weird group dynamics
and reduces transparency in W3C discussions overall.
We're not trying for a judicial process deciding guilt,
where an absolute lack of preexisting bias is essential:
we're trying to find the best way forward on often subjective questions,
where expertise, representativity, and integrity matter,
and those are well catered for via the AB and TAG elections.
Removing anyone with a hint of bias is likely to result in removing anyone with expertise in the area.
Balancing out the biases in a large group was considered better than reducing the level of expertise available to the Council.
Lastly, we've found through our experiences in the experimental Councils
that the Council process works quite well in practice:
in every instance where some participants in the Council could be seen as having a strong stake in the decision,
they were deliberately deferential,
and contributed their perspective to the debate without any attempt at steering the group in a particular direction.
3.
Why has the Council been so awfully slow?
The AB, TAG, and Team apologize for the delays,
and recognize the need to do better.
We’ve been learning, making mistakes, and improving,
and anticipate a faster response time going ahead.
The Council was introduced as an experiment under delegation from the Director,
and has been evolving over the duration of the experiment.
While it started slow, a number of things have changed to make it faster.
Spring 2022:
AB and Team developed a checklist of the practical steps to run in order to set up a Council.
Prior to that,
there was a high risk of delays in the preparations leading to the Council
being convened due to lack of clarity of who was supposed to do what next.
2022-08-16:
AB requested that the Team assumes that a Council should be created
for each Formal Objection by default
(without asking confirmation of the AB every time),
and processes Formal Objections in parallel
(rather than waiting for a Council to conclude before starting the next one).
Prior to that,
a significant backlog of Formal Objections had been accumulated.
2022-10-14:
The draft Process was amended to require deadlines
that are realistic enough to be enforceable.
2023-01-20:
The draft Process was amended to add a short-circuit during dismissal process:
if the Team recommends a disposition
and the AB, TAG, and CEO are unanimous in adopting
(no abstentions unless renouncing),
then that resolution is adopted.
2023-02-09:
The draft Process was amended to enable changing chairs.
Prior to that,
there was a risk that if the Chair's availability changed for the worse,
the whole Council would be slowed down
with no clear recourse nor any clear person in charge of addressing the issue.
The Team Contact can help schedule meetings,
reducing significant administrative delays.
The Team Contact can help with coordinating discussions
and gathering responses from the Working Group and the Objectors,
and can prompt the Council to resume its deliberations when the responses are not obtained in a timely manner.
The Team Contact can remind the Council and its Chair
of incoming deadlines and the need to make timely progress.
It is also worth noting that a large part of the Council experiment period
overlapped with the ramp up to the launch of W3C as a legal entity,
during which both the AB and the Team were overloaded with important and urgent matters,
leaving less time that would have otherwise been appropriate for Formal Objection resolution.
Formally, the Director has been in charge of initiating AC Review of new charters
and interpreting the results.
In practice,
this task has been long been delegated to the Team.
Therefore what this Process proposal encodes
is merely the practice we've been running under for years:
that the Team initiates charter reviews,
and abides by the results of AC reviews.
We have, however, tightened up how AC reviews are conducted
and what outcomes may come of them.
There is a clear sense that more transparency and Member involvement in chartering is desired,
and the Team is making improvements in this direction informally
through changes in their practices and guidelines.
However, we weren't ready yet to make additional concrete changes to the Process itself for 2023
(though we anticipate this discussion to continue into a future Process revision cycle).
For now, the proposed Process,
aside from recognizing that it is the Team,
not the Director,
that moves chartering along,
is not different from current practice,
and thus no worse.
5.
What about a NomComm for the TAG?
Diversity and representation are considered especially important in the TAG,
to ensure an ability to handle any technical topic from any industry.
Some proposed that using a Nominating Committee (NomComm) would be a good way to accomplish that,
and an earlier revision of the Director-free Process did in fact have a NomComm
randomly selected (mostly) from the set of WG chairs.
However the TAG felt this was too complicated
(and it was, in fact, quite complicated
once all the details were worked in),
and asked the AB to simply have the Team make the appointments with the input of the community.
This enables the kind of deliberate balancing that a NomComm would provide
and avoids a lot of complexity
As a safety measure,
we added a 2/3 ratification step by both the TAG and the AB
to ensure the Team appointments are acceptable to the community;
and a term limit of two consecutive appointments to ensure the Team doesn't simply re-appoint old members as a habit.
Note the TAG appointment process has also been moved to be after the election,
in order to allow the appointments to serve their intended purpose of balancing out the elected TAG.