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How to transition work from a Community Group to a Working Group

This Guidebook is the collected wisdom of the W3C Group Chairs and other collaborators.

From time to time a Community Group that has been incubating a technology seeks to advance it to the W3C Recommendation track in a Working Group. Our goal through this document is to ease that transition.

Preparation

The following questions can help a Community Group to prepare for the transition of work to a Working Group.

Is the work ready for standardization?

Please see elsewhere in the Guide: W3C Recommendation Track Readiness Best Practices.

What is the target Working Group and the relation to the CG?

If the Working Group does not yet exist, the Community Group can prepare by drafting a Working Group charter. Otherwise, if the group exists but the new work is not within its scope W3C needs to recharter the group to accommodate the new work.

The charter of the target Working Group should address two topics:

• The list of any deliverables transferred from a Community Group.
• The nature of the working relationship between the Working Group and the Community Group (if any) for any deliverable originated by the Community Group.

@@@TODO extract more from charter template discussion

Community Group chairs should keep the Community Group participants aware of the progress on the transition roadmap, in particular if it involves chartering or re-chartering a Working Group.

Is there a record of Community Group support for the transition?

It is useful to record whether and how the Community Group reached consensus on the transition (in a manner consistent with its practices). The consensus should include expectations about the working relationship with the Working Group moving forward.

Are IPR commitments in place?

Community Groups have a "two-step IPR policy" so that people make lightweight commitments when work starts and more comprehensive commitments once work is mature.

• Initially, a participant makes certain commitments regarding their own Contribution under the W3C Community Contributor Licensing Agreement (CLA).
• Later, a participant can make a voluntary commitment regarding the entire specification under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement (FSA).

By comparison, under the W3C Patent Policy for Working Groups, participants make full specification commitments upon joining the group.

There are thus three ways to procure commitments by Community Group contributors to the full text of a specification transferred to a Working Group:

1. They join (or already participate in) the Working Group, or
2. They make a commitment under the Final Specification Agreement. Note: FSA commitments may still have some value for situations where a Working Group ultimately does not advance the specification on the Recommendation Track.
3. They sign the non-participant licensing agreement for the Working Group

Each Community Group should make a determination whether to launch the process of gathering Final Specification commitments, based on (anticipated or actual) Contributor participation in the Working Group. The Community Group Web site includes tools to request and collect "Final Spec" commitments.

Once the work transitions to a Working Group, that Working Group's patent policy becomes the "primary" patent policy. Contributions to the work are henceforth made under the W3C Patent Policy. When a contributor cannot join the Working Group, W3C will provide tools so that Working Groups can ensure that substantive contributions from non-participants are made under the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.

How can Community Group Participants remain involved in the work after the transition?

In many cases, Community Group participants will want to continue their involvement in discussions about a work after it has been transferred to a Working Group.

• If a Community Group participant works for a W3C Member, the participant can ask their Advisory Committee Representative to join the Working Group.
• Otherwise, please contact Member Relations to explore W3C Membership. During that exploration, Community Group participants may continue participating in the Working Group as Invited Experts.

Operations

GitHub Repository Management

W3C has a number of GitHub mechanisms in place for specification development and to help manage IPR commitments for contributions.

If a Community Group repository is hosted in a GitHub organization not yet used by W3C to host Recommendation work:

• Will the repository itself be transitioned to the W3C GitHub organization?
• If not, is the repository owner willing to grant admin rights to @w3cbot (which is used to help with managing operational matters on W3C work, including for horizontal review and IPR management)?

Is the repository already being monitored by W3C's IPR Repo Manager?

• If yes:
  • Use the list of substantive contributors tracked by the tool for the repository (linked from the repository list) to ensure all such contributors have made the expected IPR commitments.
  • Once the transition is enacted (e.g., when the new Working Group is launched), the IPR manager will need to be updated to reflect the new IPR status of the work (contact dom@w3.org or plh@w3.org); if the repo is being moved or renamed at the time of transition, please coordinate specifically with dom@w3.org as this operation requires special handling at the moment.
  • If not, evaluate manually and even more carefully the IPR considerations described above.

  Other repository admin for the target Working Group:

  • If not already set up that way, consider moving away from using master as the name of the default branch

  Other repository admin for W3C staff.

  • Request that the systems team back up the org repositories.
  • Update or add LICENSE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md to reflect the new contribution framework.
  • Configure the repository with the labels used for tracking horizontal reviews
  • If not already set up, make sure members of the horizontal-admin team have triage access to the repo.
  • Make w3cbot a co-owner of the org (useful for integrating the IPR manager among other things).
  • Update validate-repo to monitor the repos of that org.

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  Dominique Hazael-Massieux for @w3c/guidebook. Issues welcome on GitHub