W3C — The Art of Consensus

News for Chairs, Team Contacts and Editors

• 2017-08-07: Patent Policy Errata Incorporated - W3C Patent Policy, 5 February 2004 (updated 1 August 2017)
• 2017-08-04: Upcoming changes for W3C reports and our /TR pages
• 2017-08-01: Please keep all WebEx meeting coordinates out of public view
• 2017-06-16: W3C Blog: Please, seek MarComm review and coordination
• 2017-06-12: Transition requirements update
• 2017-05-23: How to engage with the i18n WG for assistance and reviews
• 2017-05-23: Publication moratoria for second half of 2017
• 2017-05-11: [ReSpec] release v11.7.0
• 2017-05-10: TPAC 2018 dates and location: October 22-26, 2018, Lyon, France.
• 2017-05-10: *CORRECTION* AC 2018 dates and location: May 13-15, 2018, Berlin Germany
• 2017-04-18: [Echidna] New feature: dry run
• 2017-03-15: W3C Travel Policy affecting Staff Contacts
• 2017-03-07: Adds preview and diff links to pull requests (Config Helper)
• 2017-02-20: Draft checklist for accessibility of technology (comment by March 17)
• 2016-11-22: Github repo activity digest

Starting a Group

• Recommendation Track Readiness Best Practices
• Create a Charter (template, horizontal review);
• For incubation: W3C Community & Business Groups
  • W3C Team support for W3C Community Groups (in which cases can CGs get Webex and Github access from W3C)
• Join a group (see also Invited Expert Policy)
• If you need a blog, wiki, GitHub repository, or mailing list, ask your team contact.
• ...more advice on roles in a group

Running a Group

• Moderating (Facilitating) Meetings
• Speaking Guidelines
• Running a Meeting (especially a teleconference) on IRC (Web client):
  • Quick start guide for setting up tools for managing an agenda, generating minutes, and updating issues lists
  • Scheduling teleconferences
  • Holidays wiki to help planning WG work around recurring holidays
  • Scribe 101: Taking meeting minutes using W3C IRC tools
  • Individual IRC tools ("bots"):
    • Zakim for queue management
    • RRSAgent for minutes management
    • Trackbot for issue management (using Tracker) during an IRC-based meeting
• Predicting milestones
• Horizontal reviews
  • Internationalization: Contact the WG • Request a review • Review radar • Review comment tracker
  • Remember to request a review 2-3 months before CR, to allow time for discussion and rework.
• Face-to-face meetings
  • Send face-to-face meeting information to calreq@w3.org; that information appears on the events calendar
  • Host a face-to-face meeting
  • Policy Regarding Non-Disclosure Agreements and W3C Meetings
• Issue tracking:
  • Use GitHub or Tracker to track issues and action items through mail, IRC and the Web
• WBS for questionnaires
• People management
  • HumanDimension (a Chair training module)
  • Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct and Procedures to assist all parties when issues arise. See more on the Positive Work Environment Home Page
• Antitrust and Competition Guidance
• IPR Policies
• ...more advice on meetings, decisions, issue tracking

Specification Development

• W3C Editors home page and specifically the Style for Group-internal Drafts
• Advancement on the Recommendation Track:
  • Section 6.1 Technical Reports of the W3C Process
  • Transition requirements for all W3C maturity levels (First Public Draft, Last Call, CR, PR, REC, etc.)
  • Get Wide Review,
  • Pubrules (publication requirements) and links to related policies (e.g., namespaces, MIME type registration, version management, and in-place modifications) See also Pubrules issue management / tracker
  • March 2017: Obsoleting and Rescinding W3C Specifications
• Normative References; considerations the Director takes into account when evaluating normative references
• Publications can only happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays (Member-only archive of announcement), unless you use the automated publication system
• September 2015: W3C Comm Team no longer post Homepage News stories for regular WDs publications, unless explicitly requested at publication request.
• W3C Documents and license related to API definitions, code samples, or examples
• Discussion about specifications tooling and versioning on spec-prod@w3.org
• ...more advice on specification development

Speaking About Your Work

• Use the Upcoming Talks form (Member-only); talks publicized on W3C home page, Public Weekly News
• Press release testimonial guidelines
• How to Make Presentations Accessible to All

Reference

Tools in this section and the previous are in wide use and are supported by the systems team (ask for help on sysreq@w3.org) and comm team. For service enhancements or new systems projects, please contact w3t-sys@w3.org with a detailed description of your needs. Outages appear on the System Status page. See collected wisdom below for less mature tools.

Note on Member Submissions: Per section "Scope of Member Submissions" of the Process Document, "when a technology overlaps in scope with the work of a chartered Working Group, Members SHOULD participate in the Working Group and contribute the technology to the group's process rather than seek publication through the Member Submission process." Read more about how to send a Member Submission request (Member-only).

Collected Wisdom, Advice

Many of these resources were contributed by your colleagues; we invite you to write down and share your experiences as well. Discussion of issues that groups face take place on the chairs mailing list (Member-only archive). You may also find chairs meetings back to 1997 an interesting source of wisdom.

About the Guidebook

This Guidebook is intended to complement the W3C Membership Agreement and the W3C Process. This index page is Public, although a small number of resources linked from this page may be visible only to the W3C Membership or Staff.

You are expected to be familiar with the parts of this Guidebook that affect your work. Working Group chairs should get a "tour" from their team contact. Then take a look again, for example, if you're going to hold a face-to-face meeting; read the section on meetings and work with its owner, Susan, to be sure you understand what's written there, and to record any valuable knowledge you pick up along the way.

As editor of the guidebook, I will do my best to see that it gets better over time. This does not mean that I do all the editing myself! I collaborate with other collaborators who signed and dated the pages they maintain. And we need to know when information needs updating. (People with CVS access to pages are welcome to make changes to pages signed by me.)

Note: Not all pages are maintained with the same frequency. Some may be quite outdated. Please contact me if you note something that needs urgent attention, or if you want to propose updates.