The Art of Consensus (Guidebook)

Groups

A variety of W3C Groups enable W3C to pursue its mission through the creation of Web standards, guidelines, and supporting materials.

A list of group procedures related to the W3C Process is available.

Incubation: Community Group and Workshops

• How to incubate

  • W3C Community & Business Groups
  • W3C Team support for W3C Community Groups
  • W3C Workshops for starting incubation
• Exploration Interest Group

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

  • Considerations when transferring a CG Specification for Standardization

Starting a Group

• Recommendation Track Readiness Best Practices

• How to create a Working Group or Interest Group Charter

• Tool: Chartering dashboard
• How to set up a new group

Running a Group

• Join a group (see also Invited Expert Policy)
• Resources related to:
  • online and in-person meetings and workshops
  • tools
  • the W3C Process
• People management
  • HumanDimension (a Chair training module)
  • Code of Conduct and Procedures to assist all parties when issues arise. We have guidelines to suspend or remove participants from groups. See more on the Positive Work Environment Home Page
• Check out our Working Groups and Interest Groups dashboards to navigate through what we know about them. The Project Management team maintains a collection of links and tools to keep track.

Closing a Group

• How to Close a Working Group

Chairs

• Chair’s role
• W3C Chairs home page
• W3C Chair Buddy System (volunteer experienced Chairs can mentor other Chairs)

Staff Contacts

• Staff Contact’s role
• W3C Staff Contacts home page
• Liaison’s role. Note: Per section “Liaisons” of the Process Document, liaisons MUST be coordinated by the Team due to requirements for public communication; patent, copyright, and other IPR policies; confidentiality agreements; and mutual membership agreements.

Specification Development

Editors

• Editor’s role, Editor, Author, Contributor Policies
• W3C Editors home page and specifically the Style for Group-internal Drafts
• Normative References; considerations the Team takes into account when evaluating normative references
• W3C on GitHub
  • Using GitHub for Spec Work
  • Using GitHub for W3C specifications (slides)
  • GitHub Repository Manager: One interface to find all group GitHub contributors and the IPR status
  • PR Preview - Adds preview and diff links to pull requests (Config Helper)
• W3C Manual of Style

Advancing on the Recommendation Track

• Check the transition requirements for all W3C maturity levels (First Public Draft, CR, REC, etc.)
  • next step finder, if you’re not sure what the next state should be
  • milestones calculator, to help with dates.
  • Predicting milestones.
• Request Wide Review at least 2-3 months before CR, to allow time for discussion and rework. This includes requesting horizontal reviews.
• Addressing formal objections: best practices to resolve and decide Formal Objections (aka council guide)
• Tips for getting to Recommendation faster

Test Suites

• Start with web-platform-tests (WPT), home for the Open Web test suites (including W3C ones).
• All WPT contributions are licensed under the terms of the 3-Clause BSD License. For non-WPT test suites, see Test suites licenses for Contribution of Test Cases
• …more questions about the testing infrastructure? Contact public-test-infra@w3.org

Other considerations

• Obsoleting and Rescinding W3C Specifications
• Member Submissions
• Copyrights for documents, software, tests
• Considerations for joint deliverables
• W3C Documents and license related to API definitions, code samples, or examples
• Discussion about specifications tooling and versioning on spec-prod@w3.org

Speaking About Your Work

• Blogs, articles, Press interviews: Working Group participants, TAG Members, W3C Staff are among the world’s experts in Web technologies and their impacts. Give heads-up, share relevant work, things you author, or coordinate press enquiries, by writing to the W3C Communications team <w3t-pr@w3.org> about how you may attribute your work (or not) to W3C.
• Write on the W3C Blog (open to W3C Group participants, members of the W3C Team); talks publicized on W3C home page, W3C Social Media.
• Press release testimonial guidelines
• Creating and delivering effective presentations
• Making Events Accessible
• AB and TAG: Guidelines for communicating as a member of a W3C elected body

Advisory Committee

• Resources for Advisory Committee representatives
• Formal Objections & W3C Council

Reference

Guidelines and Policies

• Policies & legal information
• Positive Work Environment at W3C: Code of Conduct
• Antitrust and Competition Guidance
• Policy Regarding Non-Disclosure Agreements and W3C Meetings
• Charter Extensions
• Invited Experts policy
• Normative References guidelines
• Processing of Formal Objections
• Continuity of Operations under Travel Restrictions

Patent Policy

• W3C Patent Policy
• Commentary: FAQ, Summary, and Business Benefits
• Patent Policy Information about Groups and Disclosures can be found from the Group pages
• …more questions? Contact the PSIG

About the Guidebook

Got a question? Join #general in IRC or Slack (invite).

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

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 Staff Contact. Then take a look again, for example, if you’re going to hold a face-to-face meeting; read the section on meetings 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, @w3c/guidebook will do its best to see that it gets better over time. This does not mean that we do all the editing ourselves!