Simplified task force enrollment and participant management

The IT/Systems Operations team as the dual function of developing and supporting the technical infrastructure required to enable and operate the work of our consortium, and the tools and environments that enable participation from around the world to contribute to our technical program.

In this series, we focus on communicating incremental improvements to our tooling.

Task forces are formed by W3C groups to carry out assignments, but until now, managing who participates in them has been a manual process that usually involved asking the W3C team to update the group. We are happy to announce a set of improvements that puts task force participation management directly in the hands of participants and chairs.

Join or leave a task force yourself

Task forces can now be marked as "open enrollment". When a task force is open for enrollment, any participant of its parent group(s) can join/leave directly from the task force's homepage.

The task force's homepage now tells you exactly where you stand:

• if the task force is open for enrollment, you'll see which parent groups are eligible and a Join button (or a Leave button if you are already a participant);
• if the task force is not open for enrollment, the page says that participation requires an invitation from the group chairs.

Eligibility is checked automatically: you can only join a task force if you are a participant of one of its parent groups.

Chairs can manage participants directly

Chairs of a task force — as well as chairs of its parent groups and the W3C Team — can now add and remove participants directly from the task force's participants page, without going through the W3C Team:

• adding participants: the add form only suggests people who are participants of the parent group(s) and not yet in the task force, so there's no risk of adding someone who isn't eligible;
• removing participants: select one or more participants and remove them in a single action. Chairs and team contacts are protected from accidental removal.

This works for every task force, whether or not it's open for enrollment. Note that creating and closing task forces remains in the hands of the W3C Team.

Feedback

If you chair a group and would like one of your task forces opened for enrollment, or if you run into any issues, please reach out to your staff contact.