[whatwg] Administrivia: new member in the oversight committee

[Dan Brickley]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, Dan Brickley wrote:
>   
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>>     
>>> FYI, Anne van Kesteren was just invited to join the WHATWG "membership" (as
>>> defined by our charter, basically that's the small group of people whom I
>>> have to answer to in my role as editor). He was invited due to his long
>>> involvement in the WHATWG. This oversight group doesn't do much and this
>>> won't really change anything; basically the group is there to make sure I
>>> don't become evil and biased somehow, and to help direct the group should we
>>> decide to take on some new project.
>>>       
>> Does the committee have a mailing list? Where do they discuss things? 
>> Any papertrail?
>>     
>
> There's no public accountability for this group, no. It's roughly 
> equivalent to W3C staff, except that it is not a paid position.
>   
W3C staff report through a variety of documented means to their 
stakeholders (including at regular events, Web Conference, TPs etc), 
they have named and documented roles grounded in the W3C Process, a 
class of document for airing their proposals to the wider community 
(Team notes) as well as strong internal-transparency via extensive 
internal email, cvs and irc logging so that new team-members can have 
access to previous discussions.

Is this the equivalence you have in mind?

W3C staff as a group culture (nothing personal here; I was one myself 
years) also have a tendency to be a little over-secretive, insular, and 
too often slip into thinking of themselves as having to heroically 
figure out what to do internally before presenting an external opinion. 
Get a tight-knit, smart and distributed group of people together with a 
sense of mission, and that's a hard trait to avoid.

I hope you'll lean towards the public accountability side of things here.
> See also:
>    http://www.whatwg.org/charter
>
>   
Thanks, interesting. Is a version history and change-log available, 
beyond what can be discerned from 
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.whatwg.org/charter ?
 From the outside it is hard to understand how the charter has evolved 
over time.

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/