HI James,
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.
I think you have it backwards here. Proper procedures of the kind
Laura is suggesting prevent individuals from gaming the system. Right
now our process and procedures are ripe for gaming. I think you'd
agree we don't want that.
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.
Agreed this is a problem we face too. I agree there are some things in
this spec that don't belong. And there too without proper procedures
we can't address that side of the issue either.
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.
That might make sense for Python, but certainly not for HTML. HTML is
now the way the World communicates, there's no other document format
that is as universal as HTML. It's important we involve a plurality of
voices in its development. Regardless, if we were to follow your
analogy, it would be TBL, Dan and others not represented here who
would have the final say and not me, not you, and not Ian.
Take care,
Rob
