Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group Charter

Mission

The mission of the Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group, part of the Internationalization Activity, is to foster a community of users of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 and Version 2.0, by promoting their adoption within and outside of W3C, and gathering information on its further development.

The Interest Group is a follow-up of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group and the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group which have successfully completed their missions by publishing ITS 1.0 and ITS 2.0 as W3C Recommendations, and Best Practices for XML Internationalization (by the ITS Working Group) as a W3C Working Group Note.

An important function of the Interest Group is information sharing within and between user communities of ITS. The work of the Interest Group helps advise W3C Staff and W3C Members, as well as the XML, HTML, Internationalization and Localization Communities at large, where the W3C might most effectively allocate resources in the future.

Scope

The goal of this Interest Group is to foster a community of ITS users, through outreach activities and discussions. These activities will include the following:

• Gather requirements for possible additional features or existing feature changes.
• Help developers to implement ITS, and authors to use it, by answering questions and providing examples.
• Review W3C Working Drafts and emerging specifications from other organizations to help the adoption of ITS 1.0 and ITS 2.0
• Develop papers and presentations on how to implement and use ITS.

The group potentially may also draft a proposed charter for a Working Group to produce a successor of the ITS 2.0 specification.

Success Criteria

• Successfully gather a community of implementers and users of the ITS 1.0 and ITS 2.0 specifications.
• Enable the usage of ITS 1.0 and ITS 2.0 in a variety of new or existing W3C and non-W3C technologies.
• Maintain a list of specifications that use ITS, to demonstrate uptake.

To ease the quantitative measurement of these success criteria, the group will continue to update public pages that reflect the adoption of ITS 2.0 in tools and related technologies.

Deliverables

As an Interest Group, the Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group does not develop specifications, and, as a body, it does not have a specific set of deliverables. The Interest Group may work on (non Recommendation-track) W3C technical reports, for publication as 'Interest Group Notes'.

Liaisons

The Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group will work closely with other groups of the Internationalization Activity. The group will also, when needed, collaborate with the following external entities:

• DITA TC at OASIS
• GALA
• XLIFF TC at OASIS
• XLIFF OMOS TC at OASIS

Furthermore, the Interest Group will maintain and enhance further contacts to providers of localization tools or services.

Participation

Membership of the Internationalization Interest Group is open to the public; W3C Membership is not a prerequisite.

Membership is signified by subscribing to the mailing list, public-i18n-its-ig@w3.org. One can subscribe to the mailing list by sending an email to public-i18n-its-ig-request@w3.org, with 'subscribe' in the Subject. There is no time commitment for participation to this Interest Group.

The Chair may call occasional teleconferences or face-to-face meetings consistent with the W3C Process requirements for meetings.

Communication

This group primarily conducts its work on the public mailing list public-i18n-its-ig@w3.org (archive). The Interest Group exists primarily as an online forum. It does not typically conduct weekly phone conferences, but may organize an optional teleconference on a monthly basis, and a face-to-face meeting once a year. The Interest Group may also conduct virtual meetings using email, IRC, wiki and teleconference facilities, although the large scale, international nature of the group motivates a focus on low cost, asynchronous mechanisms such as email, its web site, and possibly a weblog. The Interest Group may on occasion meet or sponsor "Birds-Of-a-Feather" sessions at conferences, W3C Technical Plenaries or alongside other W3C meetings, at the discretion of the Chair and W3C staff contact.

Information about the group (working group notes, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group home page.

Patent Disclosures

The Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Interest Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Interest Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Interest Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply.

For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.