Inaccurate text about Membership Agreements

[hober]

In the un-numbered section named "Relation of Process Document to Patent Policy and Other Policies," the first sentence reads:

W3C Members' attention is called to the fact that provisions of the Process Document are binding on Members per the Membership Agreement [MEMBER-AGREEMENT].

This implies two things, both of which are demonstrably false:

1. That there is one, singular Membership Agreement, when in fact there are (unfortunately) many.
2. That the one, singular Membership Agreement is the linked document.

The (as I said, unfortunate) reality is that there are a number of Membership Agreements. I don't know offhand how many, but "several" is not an incorrect depiction. I also don't know offhand if all of them make the Process Document binding on Members in the way that this text presumes. (I sure hope they do!)

While in the long term it would be best to reduce the number of active Membership Agreements to one, in the short term it would be nice if this text were updated to be accurate. As it stands, a Member representative could click on the above link and think that the resulting document is the one that binds her organization, when it very well may not be.

[frivoal]

I suspect a rather simple fix could be to link to https://www.w3.org/membership/agreement/ instead of https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Agreement/Member-Agreement, as that pages talk about the fact that the Membership agreement has changed over the years, and links to all (?) successive version of it.

(And yes, by my read, all versions linked there do make the Process binding.)

[css-meeting-bot]

The Revising W3C Process CG just discussed Inaccurate text about Membership Agreements, and agreed to the following:

• RESOLVED: Change "the" to "their" and fix the link to go to the index

The full IRC log of that discussion

<fantasai> florian: Process talks about "the Membership Agreement", but there's no singular agreement
<fantasai> florian: Might confuse Members into thinking that their agreement is the linked one, which might not be the case for their organization
<fantasai> florian: Smallest change that would fix it, is just to change the link to go to the index of all Membership Agreements
<fantasai> florian: I suspect fixing the link is enough.
<fantasai> plh: sgtm
<fantasai> florian: could make it plural, but that's confusing
<plh> ack fan
<fantasai> fantasai: could change "the" to "their"
<fantasai> florian: I like that
<TallTed> +1 "their"
<fantasai> PROPOSED: Change "the" to "their" and fix the link to go to the index
<fantasai> plh: objections?
<fantasai> RESOLVED: Change "the" to "their" and fix the link to go to the index