Status: This is a draft policy for discussion. The staff is planning an experiment with this policy.
According to CG participants, a major hurdle (if not the most important hurdle) for advancing to standardization is the expectation that non-Members will need to become W3C Members. As part of lowering barriers for specifications with traction to advance to standardization, we propose that eligible contributors to a CG specification be invited to continue to participate in the W3C Working Group that takes up that specification, without requiring W3C Membership. In this document we enumerate some considerations, options, and our preferred approach.
In this document, a "substantive contribution" to a CG specification is one that meets the requirements of class 3 or 4 in section 6.2.3 Classes of Changes in the Process Document.
To be eligible for continued participation in a Working Group under this policy, a CG participant:
- must not be an employee of a W3C Member organization,
- must have made at least one substantive contribution to a CG specification, and
- must be able to identify the substantive contribution(s).
If there are doubts about whether contributions were substantive, the staff will determine eligibility (typically after discussion with the CG Editors and Chairs).
An individual who has contributed to multiple specifications may participate in multiple Working Groups under this policy.
This policy applies to individual contributors, not to their employers. However, more than one individual from a non-Member organization may be individually eligible under this policy.
Eligible individuals are invited by the staff to participate in a Working Group that has taken up the relevant specification. Eligible individuals may seek invitations from the staff.
Invitations are reviewed whenever the Working Group is rechartered or when the individual's employment affiliations change.
The staff may revoke an invitation at any time, although this is expected to be rare. The lack of contributions within the Working Group should generally not result in revocation of an invitation.
No Working Group Chair approval of an invitation is required under this policy.
Some Working Groups (e.g., CSS) publish many Recommendation-track documents. The question arises: when an individual joins a Working Group under this policy, is the scope of their participation limited to the specification they worked on in the CG, or does it extend to all specifications developed by the Working Group? An individual invited to a Working Group under this policy is considered a full participant, and may participate in discussions beyond the CG specification to which they contributed.
An IPR commitment from the individual's employer (rather than an "individual commitment") increases the confidence of the Web community in the IPR safety of the specification transferred to the Working Group.
In order for an individual to participate in a Working Group under this policy, their primary employer (or other relevant entity) must make an organizational commitment to the W3C Patent Policy for the Working Group.
Through this policy, W3C acknowledges that the Web community has benefited from voluntary contributions to Community Group specifications.
An individual invited to a Working Group under this policy is therefore not required to pay a fee. The individual's primary employer (or other relevant entity) is not required to become a W3C Member (but, of course, is welcome to join as a paying Member).
We propose to conduct an experiment to test the following hypothesis:
A zero-fee continued participation policy will provide sufficient motivation that some Community Groups will decide to pursue standardization despite previous reluctance to do so because of Membership fees.
- Work with at least two Community Groups that have Specifications with traction.
- Establish clearly that:
- They want their Specification(s) to advance to a W3C Working Group (existing or new)
- They are reluctant to take this step because significant contributors are concerned about Member fees.
- Make clear to these CGs that significant contributors (as defined above) can participate as Invited Experts, as long as their organization makes an organizational patent commitment.
- Track
- Whether these groups decide to move to standardization in a W3C Working Group.
- If the Specification(s) are taken up in a Working Group, how many non-Members from the CGs actually join the Working Group, including having their organization sign the IPR commitment.
- If eligible contributors choose not to join a Working Group, we will also interview them to understand why not (e.g., the requirement for an organizational IPR commitment).
We will rely on the existing Invited Expert agreement and simply ask organizations to make organizational patent commitments (e.g., via email acknowledgment).
Note: Parties who want to make an IPR commitment over a W3C Working Group specification without joining the Working Group may do so, but the details are outside the scope of this policy.
This policy resembles the Invited Expert policy with several modifications:
- An organizational patent commitment is required rather than an individual commitment.
- No approval by Working Group Chairs is required.
In the case of a successful experiment there are two ways to modify existing W3C policies to accommodate this new policy:
- Modify the Process Document to support a new type of participant and create an Agreement for those participants to sign, or
- Modify the Invited Expert agreement to support this policy.
We expect to gather feedback on these options.