ISSUE-151: How to resign from a working group

Resigning from a WG

How to resign from a working group

State:

CLOSED

Product:

Process Document

Raised by:

Charles 'chaals' (McCathie) Nevile

Opened on:

2015-01-11

Description:

The current Process says
[[[
3.6 Resignation from a Group

A W3C Member or Invited Expert MAY resign from a group. The Team will establish administrative procedures for resignation. See section 4.2. of the W3C Patent Policy [PUB33] for information about obligations remaining after resignation from certain groups.
]]]
After a decade and a bit, we could probably do better than that. In practice people *have* resigned from Working Groups. Do we need a formal definition?

It would mostly be relevant because the Patent Policy allows 60 days from the date of resignation to exclude material added between the FPWD+60 and the most recent Public Working draft - without a clear way of finding the date we could see problems identifying the last Public Working Draft, and the expiry of the 60 days.

Proposed:

"On written notification from an AC rep or invited expert, or equivalent action to formally leave the WG (e.g. through an automated join/leave system), the member's representatives will be deemed to have resigned from the relevant Group, effective immediately".

The edge case I see is a group agreeing to a Public Working Draft, and before it is *published* a member resigns in order to avoid having a disclosure obligation relative to material in that draft.

One possible mitigation would be to require that the resignation is announced publicly, but I believe this is not what people have generally preferred to do in the past.

Related Actions Items:

No related actions

Related emails:

1. Re: New Process Draft... - diff without must, should ... (from wayne.carr@linux.intel.com on 2015-03-06)
2. Re: New Process Draft... (from wayne.carr@linux.intel.com on 2015-03-06)
3. Agenda Process Document Task Force 3 March 2015 (from szilles@adobe.com on 2015-03-02)
4. Re: Agenda Process Document Task Force 24 February 2015 (from singer@apple.com on 2015-02-24)
5. Agenda Process Document Task Force 24 February 2015 (from szilles@adobe.com on 2015-02-24)
6. Agenda Process Document Task Force 24 February 2015 (from szilles@adobe.com on 2015-02-24)
7. List of Process Document Issue Not Currently Covered in the Process 2015 Draft being reviewed (from szilles@adobe.com on 2015-02-08)
8. Agenda Process Document Task Force 27 January 2015 (from szilles@adobe.com on 2015-01-26)
9. Re: Agenda Process Document Task Force 20 January 2015a (from singer@apple.com on 2015-01-19)
10. Agenda Process Document Task Force 20 January 2015a (from szilles@adobe.com on 2015-01-19)
11. Re: w3process-ISSUE-151 (Resigning from a WG): How to resign from a working group [Process Document] (from chaals@yandex-team.ru on 2015-01-13)
12. Re: Agenda Process Document Task Force 13 January 2015a (from chaals@yandex-team.ru on 2015-01-13)
13. Re: w3process-ISSUE-151 (Resigning from a WG): How to resign from a working group [Process Document] (from wayne.carr@linux.intel.com on 2015-01-12)
14. w3process-ISSUE-151 (Resigning from a WG): How to resign from a working group [Process Document] (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2015-01-11)

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