Dear Members,
Following up on recent discussions,
* At the last F2F in Thessaloniki
<https://cabforum.org/2019/08/16/minutes-for-ca-browser-forum-f2f-meeting-47-thessaloniki-12-13-june-2019/#Instructions-for-creating-ballots-and-challenges-for-moving-canonical-versions-of-all-Guidelines-to-GitHub>
* On the server certificate WG list
<https://cabforum.org/pipermail/servercert-wg/2019-August/000896.html>
and since the current Bylaws (version 2.2) do not address how the Chair
or Vice-Chair could make any changes whatsoever to the Final Guidelines
or Final Maintenance Guidelines, I would like to prepare a ballot with
some administrative language that would allow the Forum or WG Chair (or
Vice-Chair) to make some changes to Final Guidelines and Final
Maintenance Guidelines. Please note that these practices are already in
place and have been followed for years without any "official" approval
from the Forum or a WG and without having received any objections by the
Membership.
Since this is language that would normally be in the Bylaws, and while
we have other issues pending to discuss
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EtrIy3F5cPge0_M-C8J6fe72KcVI8H5Q_2S6S31ynU0>,
I would like to propose to ballot these issues separately and once we
collect a few, we could update the Bylaws including language for all
these separate issues. I understand that we don't want to make too
frequent changes to our Bylaws because it involves legal reviews that
take additional time, etc.
I would like to start with what seems to be an uncontroversial issue.
There seems to be consensus to allow the Chair or Vice-Chair to update
informative (non-normative) sections of the Guidelines. Here is a list
of changes that the Chair or Vice-Chair should be allowed to do on a
Final Guideline or Final Maintenance Guideline before it is published on
our public web site and without requiring a ballot procedure:
1. The cover page,
2. The Table of Contents
3. Headers/Footers with version numbers and page numbers
4. The table with document revisions or Document History
5. The table with Relevant Dates, unless the ballot explicitly updates
this table
I would also recommend removing the first paragraph of the EV Guidelines
which reads:
"This version 1.7.0 represents the Extended Validation Guidelines, as
adopted by the CA/Browser Forum as of Ballot SC17, passed by the Forum
on 21 May 2019 and effective as of 21 June 2019." I believe it's
redundant because this information is included in the revision history
table and the public web site.
Are there any comments or additional changes that members would like to
see before I start drafting some language? I plan on having something
ready by the end of next week.
Thank you,
Dimitris.
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