OpenAndTransparentW3C/Group Openness

From W3C Wiki

W3C Working Groups have 2 options when it comes to public visibility:

  1. public
  2. member-confidential

Most W3C WGs are now chartered as public groups, with all technical discussion taking place in public (or reported in public, in the case of meetings). This lowers the barrier for participation and transparency; but it does pose some challenges for W3C's member-fee model.

Should W3C push to be more open?

Background

In 2006, very few W3C Working Groups operated in the public. They had public mailing lists for review and feedback, and they published periodic “heartbeat” working drafts of their specifications for public review, but neither the technical conversations nor editor's drafts of specifications were publicly visible; they were restricted to Member-confidential space.

Starting in 2007, working groups began to operate more in the public. Now, it's normal, and even expected, that working groups do their technical work in public, with technical discussion happening on the public mailing lists, and even meeting minutes published publicly.

At the time of this writing (August 2014), the great majority of W3C working groups are chartered to operate in the public. There are 37 public working groups, and only 6 Member-only working groups; this seems to have improved the quality of our technical work, decreased our perception of W3C as a pay-to-play organization, and has improved our reputation overall. Concern that we would lose members if groups became public is reasonable, but questionable; in fact, W3C has increased in both influence and in number of members in the 7 years that this transition from Member-only to public has occurred.

Most new working groups are public; most groups with member-only confidentiality are at least 7 years old. Should new groups be chartered as public unless strong rationales for member-only confidentiality are evidenced?

It would be interesting to study correlations (not necessarily causative) between public-vs.-private confidentiality and the effectiveness of working groups, in the areas of:

  • quality of technical work
  • engagement by community, especially non-W3C members
  • participation (especially member participation)
  • uptake (implementation of the specifications)
  • speed to recommendation
  • speed of implementation
  • use by authors
  • participant satisfaction
  • changes to the group over time.

It would also be useful to examine the reasons for making a group member-only:

  • Coordination with other groups, some of which are public
  • Specific Members' desire to operate in a confidential way
  • ?

Current confidentiality of Working Groups

Below are the details of each group's confidentiality. You can see an overview in this donut chart of Working Group confidentiality.

Public

There are 31 working groups chartered as Public (though even in these groups, certain topics are discussed confidentially, such as IPR, implementation intentions, or personal behavior).

You can read more about each group, including its charter, on the W3C Activities page.

  • Audio
  • Browser Testing and Tools
  • CSV on the Web
  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  • Data on the Web Best Practices
  • Device APIs
  • Forms
  • Geolocation
  • HTML
  • Independent User Interface (Indie UI)
  • Internationalization
  • Linked Data Platform (LDP)
  • Math
  • Near Field Communications
  • Pointer Events
  • RDFa
  • SVG
  • Social Web
  • System Applications
  • Timed Text
  • Tracking Protection
  • Web Application Security
  • Web Applications
  • Web Cryptography
  • Web Notification
  • Web Performance
  • Web Real-Time Communications
  • WebFonts
  • XML Core
  • XML Processing Model
  • XML Security

Public With Caveats

There are 6 working groups chartered as Public, but with explicit caveats around certain topics.

  • Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
    • "Proceedings are Public. Some communications between editors and/or during implementation testing period may be member-confidential."
    • charter
  • Education and Outreach Working Group
    • "Proceedings are Public. Some communications between editors may be member-confidential."
    • charter
  • Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group
    • "Proceedings are Public. Some communications between editors may be member-confidential."
    • charter
  • Research and Development Working Group
    • "Proceedings are Public. Some communications between editors may be member-confidential."
    • charter
  • User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
    • "Proceedings are Public. Some communications between editors and/or during implementation testing period may be member-confidential."
    • charter
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
    • "Proceedings are Public. Some communications between editors may be member-confidential."
    • charter

Member-Only

There are 6 working groups chartered as Member-Only.