XML Signature WG Contributor Policies [text]

This document describes the contributor and copyright policies associated with products of the IETF/W3C XML Signature WG. The patent policy is specified in the Charter; notice of patents, which WG members must disclose, are documented on the WG Patent Disclosure page.

Copyright

The products of the Working Group are vested jointly in the W3C & The Internet Society and is designated with the following notice:

Copyright  © 1999 The Internet Society & W3C (MIT, INRIA, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.

Working group members who are not willing to contribute under these terms must refrain from doing so and notify the Chairs as to the reason why.

Document Roles

The WG has three defined roles of contribution towards of a WG product.

Editor

Editors are responsible for reflecting the proposals and consensus of the WG within the specification. "Each document produced by a group will be edited by one or more editors appointed by the group Chair. It is the responsibility of these editors to ensure that the decisions of the group are correctly reflected in subsequent drafts of the document." http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/#DocumentsGeneral

Author

Authors by their own initiative or through commitments to the Chairs make substantive contributions that are included within the specification. Frequently an author will make and write a proposal that is then the basis of a section of the specification. Criteria for authorship are the expressed interest (agreed to by the Chairs) to be listed as an author and the substance and quality of the contributions. The Chairs look at the consistency of participation, the willingness to take action items, and how much "authoring" the WG member actually accomplished. This criteria is somewhat relative in that if this role is designated, the Chairs wish to list the top handful of people that consistently plugged away on the work while avoid a list of names occupying the first two pages of the specification. Where the number of authors/editors are small, the Author and Editor role is frequently collapsed in to the Editor designation. Where there are numerous authors, the role will be a specified subset of the Contributor designation which is an Appendix to the specification.

Contributor

Contributors are the many important WG members who provide the ideas, comments, feedback and implementation experience that makes the specification meaningful. Criteria for the contributor role are an expressed interest to be listed as a contributor to the document and the quality of contribution as determined by the Chairs; this is based on the consistency of participation on the email list, participation in teleconferences and face-to-face meetings as appropriate, and a responsiveness to open WG issues. In reality, this criteria is fairly relaxed in that the Chairs wish to include all of those that helped and not weaken that acknowledgement through the inclusion of WG members that did not. Contributors are listed as an appendix to the specification.

Note that neither the IETF nor W3C have processes define the role of author. However, it has become clear through experience that this distinction is sometimes a useful one within a WG. In the end, it is only the editors that are listed on the http://www.w3.org/TR page or within the header of IETF documents for reference elsewhere. The Chairs will consider a final formulation in a way that is reasonably terse but as fair as possible to all involved.

Duration

In the event that a WG member discontinues their participation in one of the roles above, the Chairs have the option of removing the WG member from attribution of that role. Criteria of removal include duration and reason of absence, as well as the weight of previous contributions to the present draft. The goal is to give credit where credit is due, but not to carry forward attributions that are no longer relevant to the latest draft.

Defined Roles

The following table describes the current WG documents and specified roles. Note that not all of these documents will be advanced along the standards process. Instead, documents may be incorporated or broken up, in which case attribution of authorship and contribution is likely to bubble up or down accordingly.

Last revised by Reagle $Date: 2002/04/09 20:51:58 $