The Art of Consensus

Starting a Group

• Recommendation Track Readiness Best Practices

• Create a Charter

• How to incubate

  • W3C Community & Business Groups
  • W3C Team support for W3C Community Groups
  • W3C Workshops for starting incubation
• How to transition work from a Community Group to a Working Group
• Invited Expert Policy)
• If you need a blog, wiki, GitHub repository, or mailing list, ask your team contact.
• …more advice on roles in a group

Running a Group

• W3C Chair Buddy System (volunteer experienced Chairs can mentor other Chairs)
• Check out our collection of links and tools to keep track.
• Moderating (Facilitating) Meetings
• Creating and delivering effective presentations

• Running a Meeting (especially a teleconference) on IRC (Web IRC client):

  • See how to setup a new group for general tooling advises
  • Quick start guide on setting up tools for managing an agenda, generating minutes, and updating issues lists
  • Scheduling teleconferences
  • Group calendars
  • Holidays wiki to help planning WG work around recurring holidays

  • Individual IRC tools (“bots”):

    • Zakim for queue management, start and end meeting
    • RRSAgent for minutes management
    • Hints for rescuing minutes when RRSAgent is absent
• Predicting milestones, use our milestones calculator to help with dates.

• Face-to-face meetings

  • Host a face-to-face meeting and Standard Venue Arrangements for W3C Events: Conferences, Workshops, and Meetings
  • Policy Regarding Non-Disclosure Agreements and W3C Meetings
  • Continuity of Operations under Travel Restrictions
  • W3C Travel Policy affecting Staff Contacts

• Issue tracking:

  • Use GitHub to track issues through mail and the Web
• WBS for questionnaires

• People management

  • HumanDimension (a Chair training module)
  • Positive Work Environment Home Page
• Antitrust and competition policy
• Copyrights for documents, software, tests
• …more advice on meetings, decisions, issue tracking

Closing a Group

• How to Close a Working Group

Specification Development

• W3C Editors home page and specifically the Style for Group-internal Drafts

• Advancement on the Recommendation Track:

  • W3C Process for Busy People
  • Section 6.3 Technical Reports of the W3C Process
  • Considerations for joint deliverables
  • Transition requirements for all W3C maturity levels (First Public Draft, CR, PR, REC, etc.). Try also our step finder and look at milestones calculator.
  • Request Wide Review at least 2-3 months before CR, to allow time for discussion and rework. This includes requesting horizontal reviews.
  • publication requirements) and links to related policies (e.g., namespaces, media type registration, version management, and in-place modifications) See also Pubrules issue management
  • March 2017: Obsoleting and Rescinding W3C Specifications
• Normative References; considerations the Team takes into account when evaluating normative references
• Addressing formal objections: best practices to resolve and decide Formal Objections (aka council guide)
• Publications can only happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays (automated publication system
• September 2015: W3C Comm Team no longer post Homepage News stories for regular WDs publications, unless explicitly requested at publication request.
• W3C Documents and license related to API definitions, code samples, or examples
• Discussion about specifications tooling and versioning on [email protected]
• …more advice on specification development

Speaking About Your Work

• Blogs, articles, Press interviews: Working Group participants, TAG Members, W3C Staff are among the world’s experts in Web technologies and their impacts. Give heads-up, share relevant work, things you author, or coordinate press enquiries, by writing to the W3C Communications team <[email protected]> about how you may attribute your work (or not) to W3C.
• Write on the W3C Blog (open to W3C Group participants, members of the W3C Team); talks publicized on W3C home page, W3C Social Media.
• Press release testimonial guidelines
• Creating and delivering effective presentations
• Making Events Accessible

Reference

Tools in this section and the previous are in wide use and are supported by the Systems Team (ask for help on [email protected]) and Communications Team. For service enhancements or new systems projects, please contact [email protected] with a detailed description of your needs. Outages and scheduled operations appear on the W3C Systems Status page. See collected wisdom below for less mature tools.

Systems and Tools

• Markup Validators, normative references checker, and more tools
• See also: Tools Wikiand W3C Editors home page
• Mailing list archive of tools announcements (Member-only)
• Edit your contact information or affiliation
• Start with modern tooling for ongoing tooling issues.

Mailing Lists

• Mailing Lists archives
• Mailing Lists Search service
• Your Mailing List subscriptions
• SmartList Remote Maintainers Guide
• Spam filtering options

Guidelines and Policies

• Policies & legal information
• Antitrust and Competition Guidance
• Charter Extensions
• Invited Experts policy
• Normative References guidelines
• Processing of Formal Objections
• Continuity of Operations under Travel Restrictions

Patent Policy

• W3C Patent Policy
• Commentary: Business Benefits
• Patent Policy Information about Groups and Disclosures can be found from the Group pages
• …more questions? Contact the PSIG

Test Suites

• Start with web-platform-tests (WPT), home for the Open Web test suites (including W3C ones).
• All WPT contributions are licensed under the terms of the Test suites licenses for Contribution of Test Cases
• …more questions about the testing infrastructure? Contact [email protected]

Process

• W3C Process Document
• Guidelines to suspend or remove participants from groups
• Guidelines for disciplinary action
• Antitrust and Competition Guidance
• W3C Process Community Group.
• …more questions? Contact the Advisory Board

Note on Member Submissions: Per how to send a Member Submission request.

Chair Training Modules

• Minutes).
• Minutes) Blog post for keeping your reviewer on track.
• recording)
• minutes)
• minutes)
• minutes)
• audio)

Collected Wisdom, Advice

Many of these resources were contributed by your colleagues; we invite you to write down and share your experiences as well. Discussion of issues that groups face take place on the chairs mailing list (Member-only archive). You may also find chairs meetings back to 1997 an interesting source of wisdom.

Roles

• Chair’s role; Guidance for Multiple Chairs
• Editor’s role, Editor, Author, Contributor Policies
• Team Contact’s role
• Liaison’s role. Note: Per section “Liaisons” of the Process Document, liaisons MUST be coordinated by the Team due to requirements for public communication; patent, copyright, and other IPR policies; confidentiality agreements; and mutual membership agreements.
• Advisory Committee Representative (Member-only)
• Guidelines for communicating as a member of a W3C elected body

Advice on Meetings, Decisions, Issue Tracking

• Resources about W3C Meetings
• TrackingIssues
• Doing a Hybrid Group Meeting
• The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings

Advice on Specification Development

• Most popular editing tools: respec
• W3C Manual of Style
• Tips for getting to Recommendation faster

GitHub

• W3C on GitHub
• Using GitHub for W3C specifications (slides)
• GitHub Repository Manager: One interface to find all group GitHub contributors and the IPR status
• Config Helper)

Historical

• W3C XML Specification DTD (XMLspec), by Norman Walsh.

• XMLSpec diff generation
• QA resources: QA Framework primer
• HTML Slidy for slide presentations

About the Guidebook

Got a question? Join #general in invite).

This Guidebook is intended to complement the W3C Process. This page is Public, although a small number of resources linked from this page may be visible only to the W3C Membership or Team.

You are expected to be familiar with the parts of this Guidebook that affect your work. Working Group chairs should get a “tour” from their team contact. Then take a look again, for example, if you’re going to hold a face-to-face meeting; read the section on meetings to be sure you understand what’s written there, and to record any valuable knowledge you pick up along the way.

As editor of the guidebook, @w3c/guidebook will do its best to see that it gets better over time. This does not mean that we do all the editing ourselves!

Note: Not all pages are maintained with the same frequency. Some may be quite outdated. Please add your issues to the GitHub repository of this Guidebook if you have any specific comments and/or proposals to improve this Guidebook.