TPAC group and joint-group meetings

The goal of group meetings during a W3C TPAC (Technical Plenary & Advisory Committee) is to gather the community together, to create momentum and collective brainstorming around challenges faced by the web. The technical plenary is a set of collaborative meetings, bringing together W3C technical groups, the Advisory Board (AB), the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and the Advisory Committee (AC) for exciting, coordinated work. The benefit of assembling the community for thought-provoking discussions is invaluable.

While W3C groups meet throughout the year in a variety of ways (teleconference, F2F), the annual TPAC plays a unique and special role in the annual calendar of a group. What sets these meetings apart is that by having the group adjacent to many other groups, the group can achieve much that it cannot without such proximity.

TPAC generic advice

1. Your meeting will be added to the W3C Calendar of the group as part of the main TPAC event. Make sure you add the agenda and any other relevant materials to the entry!
2. A hybrid meeting is one where some attendees participate in-person and others from remote locations (see dealing with timezones).
3. See our considerations regarding Zoom, including recordings and automated meeting transcripts.
4. If you plan to offer a presentation, please provide links to any slidedeck and other presentation materials as early as possible prior to the meeting, so that local and remote participants may get prepared for the discussion. If possible, it is also best to have these presentation materials available for projection during Q&A sessions during or after the main presentation, and for inclusion within meeting minutes (see embedding slides if the group takes minutes on IRC).
5. Similarly, please consider recording your presentation and sharing with the group prior to the meeting, along with captions and a transcript. See our recording tips.
6. Consider if a breakout session might be useful.

TPAC group meetings

TPAC meeting is an opportunity for a Working or Interest Group to:

1. look on the progress and goals of the group as well as the deliverables;
2. look at related work (e.g., in Community Groups) and what’s new out there within the scope or related to the group’s mission;
3. welcome new participants, understand their interests, get their questions/feedback on the group, and potentially mentor them on how to contribute;
4. welcome observers, understand their interests in the group, and get them interested in joining the group and helping;

On the deliverables:

• State of the Working Group and its deliverables (past, present and future)

  • high level view of the Working Group (success/challenges, goals, how close is the group to meeting its charter goals?, etc.)

  • Reports on deliverables. Make sure to go through each, even if nothing changed and it gets brief, since some might be in needs in any case.

    • state of issues/pull requests
    • state of tests
    • state of implementation
    • last 12 months progress
    • expectations/hopes for next 12 months (e.g., important milestones coming up)
    • what contributions would be welcome from other/new participants

• Blocking issues that are difficult to progress on in weekly calls. Some indicators of such issue:

  • Does the issue need more than 25% of the group to be present to be moved forward? if you only need to talk to 2 or 3 individuals, take those on the side unless asked otherwise
  • Does an issue require participants from outside (participants from other groups, etc.)
  • Does the issue need a whiteboard in the room to be discussed?
  • Do you need guidance or help, such as choosing between several designs/solutions?
  • Ask participants which issue they would like to dive in? (limit of [2? 3?] per participant?)

TPAC joint meetings

TPAC is an opportunity for joint meetings between groups:

1. issues (blocking or otherwise) that you’d be able to advance if you can schedule a joint meeting with another group, or with representatives from that group
2. horizontal issues raised during wide reviews that have been queued
3. requests sent to other groups that did not progress

TPAC Breakouts

If your group has topic(s) of general interest, consider organizing a breakout session to attract a wider audience.