Ian Hickson wrote:
On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, Dan Brickley wrote:
Ian Hickson wrote:
FYI, Anne van Kesteren was just invited to join the WHATWG "membership" (as
defined by our charter, basically that's the small group of people whom I
have to answer to in my role as editor). He was invited due to his long
involvement in the WHATWG. This oversight group doesn't do much and this
won't really change anything; basically the group is there to make sure I
don't become evil and biased somehow, and to help direct the group should we
decide to take on some new project.
Does the committee have a mailing list? Where do they discuss things?
Any papertrail?
There's no public accountability for this group, no. It's roughly
equivalent to W3C staff, except that it is not a paid position.
W3C staff report through a variety of documented means to their
stakeholders (including at regular events, Web Conference, TPs etc),
they have named and documented roles grounded in the W3C Process, a
class of document for airing their proposals to the wider community
(Team notes) as well as strong internal-transparency via extensive
internal email, cvs and irc logging so that new team-members can have
access to previous discussions.
Is this the equivalence you have in mind?
W3C staff as a group culture (nothing personal here; I was one myself
years) also have a tendency to be a little over-secretive, insular, and
too often slip into thinking of themselves as having to heroically
figure out what to do internally before presenting an external opinion.
Get a tight-knit, smart and distributed group of people together with a
sense of mission, and that's a hard trait to avoid.
I hope you'll lean towards the public accountability side of things here.
See also:
http://www.whatwg.org/charter
Thanks, interesting. Is a version history and change-log available,
beyond what can be discerned from
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.whatwg.org/charter ?
From the outside it is hard to understand how the charter has evolved
over time.
cheers,
Dan
--
http://danbri.org/
