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Representing the W3C
In a director-free world, it's not at all clear that the Team/W3M should be issuing statements / signing agreements like this:
https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/9298
Currently this is justified because it's done under the imprimatur of the Director. Without a Director, we need to ask ourselves:
- Can anyone speak for the community in this manner without going through the consensus process (i.e., issuing a Recommendation)?
- If so, who and under what conditions?
In the IETF, the answer to question 1 is "no", so we have qualified things like IAB statements and other communications that clearly limit the scope of who's speaking. That might be best here as well.
Providing the current public speaking guidelines for reference: https://www.w3.org/2014/01/PSGMatrix
This also relates to #429
There is a need to answer those requests in a timely fashion so doing something similar to MoU would take too long since it's going through the full AC. I wonder if we can replace this role of the Director by the W3C Council. We could be more granular and, depending on the type (S1, S2, etc.), we could split those A4 associations between the AB and the TAG.
Noting that the Council is still an experiment - if we wanted the Council to take on roles like this, other than as a "last resort" of resolving Formal Objections, we should probably structure it a little differently. The current idea is that distinct instances of the Council would be formed for specific FO responses; these would be short-lived strike teams. It seems like this is more of a long-standing "Directorate Committee" or something. (I'm not saying that's wrong, or that we couldn't do this sort of structure - I haven't thought it through - but the Council as we've considered it, where it is effectively formed and reformed with every FO resolution needed - is not really the right match for "we have decisions we need to make quickly, on an ongoing basis."
This drifts into the area that people were so concerned about regarding policy discussions. I'd encourage folks to consider if the W3C needs to do this sort of thing -- the IETF manages without it.
As @jeffjaffe pointed out in https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/582#issuecomment-951459245, there are existing policies about this. They may need to evolved, but that seem to me to fall under the purview of the BoD (who might delegate if they wish). Proposing to close as out of scope for the Process, and overtaken by the Legal Entity.
I'd like to propose to move this to the AB. https://www.w3.org/2014/01/PSGMatrix may well need an update, but that's something that is best discussed between the AB and CEO, not in this CG.
Closed in favor of discussion in https://github.com/w3c/AB-memberonly/issues/185#issuecomment-2098165703, as per the Resolution taken in https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2024May/0000.html