Transition to the W3C standards track

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Complemented by W3C Team and community work on collection of best practices for bringing work on the W3C recommendation track.


The Community Group Process complements the Recommendation Track and is designed to facilitate transition to the Recommendation Track. Working Groups are chartered to create Recommendations from Community Group specifications according to the usual W3C Process for creating Working Groups. W3C intends to investigate ways to streamline the process, especially for Community Groups that have been working in public for some time.


Use case: JSON LD

  • Ian and Manu talked about parallel development in CG and WG. IJ proposed:
    • CG does the work on an ongoing basis.
    • WG publishes WDs periodically (to get WG commitments over full text and show WG ownership)
    • CG does not generally need to do FSA (since most CG participants also in the WG) but suggest an FSA prior to the WG's CR publication.

Use case: Responsive Images

  • The CG cannot publish on /TR/, only the HTML Working Group can.
    • To do this, the editor of the spec formats the document according to "pubrules" [1] and then the Document Contact (e.g., Mike Smith) sends a "transition request" according to the publication process [2]. (When you visit [1] and [2] you need to pick First Public Working Draft from the dropdown to see the requirements for that step.)
    • The "transition request" goes to the Director (actually Ralph Swick). He does a sanity check of the situation and then approves it. Then the Document Contact a "publication request" to our Webmaster, who makes it appear on /TR/.
  • Regarding patent commitments, it looks like you've already secured "Final Spec Agreement (FSA) Commitments" from a number of people for the Picture Element.
    • If you believe you have commitments from all the real contributors, then you can just point the HTML WG at this list and say "Here are the final specification commitments we have received. As Chair, I believe these cover the material contributions to the specification."
    • You should identify any individuals or companies participating in the CG that are NOT also participating in the HTML Working Group. If they have not yet made an FSA Commitment, contact them and insist.
  • Regarding copyright, there's nothing to do.

FAQ

How do I get a Working Group started for our CG work?

  • Find someone on the Team (e.g,. Community Development Lead via team-community-process) to start discussion about target (new group, existing group)
  • Evaluate relevance and completeness of FSA commitments.
  • Draft a charter
  • See information from TPAC 2012 presentation

How does our group ensure that there is proper IPR coverage when the spec transitions to WG?

  • We seek organizational commitments. Individual participation is granted when contributors own the rights to their contributions.
  • We ask Groups to issue a call for final specification commitments before handing the specification to a WG.
  • We ask Chairs to ensure that active contributors to a specification sign the FSA.
  • When an active organization does not sign the FSA and is not in the target WG we can ask that organization to join the WG or make an RF commitment for the Rec-track document. In order to determine which Members are in CG but not in a WG we should have an easy way to compare the lists.

In a WG spec derived from a CG spec, how should the relationship be described?

  • While there is no fixed text, here is one sample of text that could go in a TR status section (based on the JSON-LD specification):
    • This specification was derived from a report published previously by the <a href="@@">Foo Community Group</a>.
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