Approval of FPWDs and CRs during charter transition
Comments
The proposed Process 2016 introduces the following: " Transition requests to First Public Working Draft or Candidate Recommendation will not normally be approved while a Working Group's charter is undergoing, or awaiting a Director's decision on, an Advisory Committee Review, until the Director issues a Call for Participation for the Working Group. " [1]
Depending on the interpretation, this addition may be either overly restrictive (1) or doesn't have effects (2).
(1) If the sentence is intended to prevent Groups from publishing FPWD and CR within 60 days of the end of their charter period, it will have unintended side-effects imho. First, it doesn't prevent Groups that are actually closing from doing so since those don't trigger charter AC reviews. "Working Group 's new charter" is a relative notion in the case of merging or splitting Groups and arguments will be made that a specific case doesn't apply "because it's not a charter for that Group". Second, FPWD for documents that contain non-normative materials will be discouraged and the Group will be advised to publish directly a Working Group Note, even if they're meaning to attract wide reviews within those 60 days. Third, if the Group is 3 months away from publishing a REC but would like to start a new charter that keeps, adds or remove deliverables (it happens recently with Web Performance for example), it will have the unfortunate choice between delaying their REC (if they need to update their CR with a substantive change) or delaying requesting to keep, add or remove deliverables to their charter to avoid the 60 blackout period for the purpose of updating their CR. Fourth, that sentence prevents valid cases that are listed under (2) below. I believe that the sentence needs more refinement and considerations before we add it into the W3C Process and make the current rechartering process more complex.
(2) If an existing charter is effective (because it has been extended by the Director or because it's within its initial time period), a Group is allowed to publish a document under that current charter. This is independent of ongoing AC reviews as far as I know. This allows us cases such as adding an additional deliverable mid-charter, adding the document into an additional charter to make it a joint deliverable, publishing updated CR documents to keep our milestones as close as possible, etc. The sentence added in Process 2016 could be interpreted as not changing this since it's talking about the charter undergoing the AC review, and not about the current charter of the Group. As such, if an existing charter has been extended for the purpose of allowing time while we're undergoing an AC review for a new charter period, a Group is still allowed to publish FPWD and CR under the extended charter and I'm not sure what the sentence is adding or preventing.