Welcome to the orientation page for the community group. The page is intended as a quick-start and cheat-sheat.
The purposes of these locations are described below.
This page - you might want to boookmark.
Home page at W3C.
GitHub Pages read-only interface to group materials.
GitHub Repository via GitHub standard interface.
IRC (irc:irc.w3.org:6667) for IRC Clients - channel name is md-odrl-profile
IRC Web Interface at W3C - channel name is md-odrl-profile
The Community Group conducts its business using periodic teleconferences and on its public mailing list, which members and non-members alike may subscribe to and to review the archive.
Substantive decisions are confirmed on teleconferences held every two weeks, starting on Wednesday 29 April 2020. The call takes place at 1100 US Eastern Time (at present 1600 UK and Ireland, 1700 Central Europe). Since the W3C operates its teleconference system on US Eastern time, from time to time the call will change in other time zones. The call duration is 60 minutes and is open to Members only member accessible calendar invite.
Teleconferences are minuted, as described below.
Please familiarise yourself with policy for the use of and help with W3C mailing lists.
Along with the voice element of the call there is also a “chat” element, which takes place on IRC (the predecessor of many modern day chat systems). Details of connecting to and using IRC for Community Grooup business, below. The IRC chat is used by the meeting chair to coordinate who is to speak, and a special person in nominated for each call to “Scribe”, meaning that a record is kept in the chat of participants comments, as well as decisions (resolutions) and actions and issues gathered for consideration outside the discussion. The record thus maintained becomes the enduring minutes of the meeting, published in the public email list.
See How to use IRC for W3C calls and more details of W3 IRC. Please choose a nickname that makes it clear who you are. There is a Web interface to W3C IRC, which you may find more convenient than installing an IRC app.
Participants may request (verbally) that a particular comment is not scribed for the public record. If a participants comments are not scribed accurately they are expected to make that known, with a clarification, on the IRC channel.
Participants may interact with the two “bots” that are present on the channel (Zakim and RRSAgent). The interactions are mostly for chairs and scribe, but there are some important interactions for participants discussed at How to use IRC for W3C calls and amplified below:
When someone has a comment to make they type q+ or q+ to point out that learned colleague is misinformed so that it’s clear what they wish to say. This allows poeple to indicate that they wish to speak while someone else is speaking, without interrupting the speaker. q- if you wish to remove yourself from the speaker queue.
Once you have joined the channel, and after the bots have started the meeting, enter present+ <your name>. If you leave before the end of the meeting, enter present-. This allows your presence in the meeting to be recorded in the minutes, and notes the point at which you joined and left the meeting,
Strictly speaking this is not interaction with a bot, but when the chair wishes to establish consensus on a topic, they may propose a resolution, in IRC, e.g. PROPOSED RESOLUTION: Frogs are to be considered mammals for the purposes of this specification, allowing participants to express support, or dissent, using the convention+1 for support and -1 contrariwise. If the resolution is taken this will be recorded RESOLUTION: Frogs are to be considered mammals for the purposes of this specification.
GitHub is used to manage working group materials. The issue tracking feature of GitHub is used to allow conversations between participants about particular points of discussion that require resolution.
Some organisations block access to github.com but do not block access to github.io. Group marterials may be read using the github.io interface. If necessary, key documents will be mirrored to the Group Home at W3C. Issues cannot be accessed other than via github.com.