Laura Carlson wrote:
I'm not sure having a formal procdure for this is needed, to
be honest.
Like I mentioned before policies and procedures can:
- Help everyone be aware of what is expected
- Help prevent misunderstandings about expectations
- Standardize operations
- Provide more clarity and consistency
- Encourage stability and continuity in operations
- Stabilize action despite top-level changes
- Discourage actions based on personalities
- Help avoid future conflict
It's worth noting that policies and procedures have a downside too; they
can slow down a process by creating unnecessary bureaucracy, make
organizations less able to respond to changing circumstances, and often
allow so-minded individuals to easily game a system by subverting the
formal process.
This isn't to say that I think that having a better documented process
is necessarily a bad idea (indeed there is already a great deal of W3C
process). However I think it is worth considering very carefully what
problems you want to solve before adding new process. For example you
have asked for a formal process for people to get their ideas into the
spec. However you have not mentioned the rather critical issue of how to
keep stuff out of the spec; I would argue that this is really the more
important side of the issue because saying "no" to people tends to go
down less well than "yes", but putting in every half-baked idea that
anyone comes up with has a significantly worse effect on the quality of
the language (and hence the web as a platform) than failing to pick up
all the good stuff as soon as it is first brought up.
But most of all, a policy and procedures would help show that the W3C
means to be above-board, fair, and accountable and not arbitrary,
inconsistent, unjust, partial, disenfranchising, or discriminating.
I guess that would depend on what any process was, right? For example,
as I understand it, the Python programming language has a process which
amounts to "in the event of conflict Guido (the language's inventor)
gets the final say". It could be argued that this "process" is neither
fair nor accountable, yet it has produced an extremely high quality and
popular product which has retained a strong design aesthetic critical to
the success of the language.
--
"Mixed up signals
Bullet train
People snuffed out in the brutal rain"
--Conner Oberst
