Status: This is a draft with no standing. Questions? Raise issues in this repo or contact Ian Jacobs and Dominique Hazaël-Massieux. See also the AB Priority Project on Incubation & white paper on incubation (Member-only), Recommendation Track Readiness Best Practices, and the existing CG transition guide.
It is a goal of the Community Group program that specifications with traction advance to a standardization process, either within W3C or another SDO. The W3C staff seeks to support Community Groups as soon as they begin to contemplate standardization. We document here common questions and considerations when transferring a CG Specification for standardization.
- Has the community documented the use cases the CG Specification seeks to address (e.g., is there an explainer)?
- Have the parties who have those use cases been involved in the development of the Specification?
- Have implementers been involved in its development? Given signals of interest (e.g., actual implementations or announcements of intent to prototype)?
- Are there multiple independent parties contributing to the CG Specification, or is the effort largely driven by a single organization or individual?
- Is there consensus within the group for the approach?
- Are there strong signals of disagreement within or outside the group? Have there been attempts to work through those?
- Do you have a regular point of contact on the W3C staff?
- Is the CG Specification actively changing, or stable (and if so, when was it last modified)?
- How many independent implementations are there?
- Does the Specification depend heavily on other technologies that are not yet on a standards track?
- Are there aspects of the opportunity that are time-sensitive?
- What are the signals of industry demand for a standard in this space?
- Are there pilots?
- What are the signals of a regulatory demand for a standard in this space?
- Are there references to the CG Specification from other specifications (from CGs, W3C WGs, or other SDOs)?
- Are there other signals that lead the group to believe that there is an emerging standardization opportunity?
- Does the group plan to call for Final Specification commitments. W3C does not require Final Specification commitments before a transfer to a W3C Working Group.
- Are there any known IPR issues related to the CG Specification?
- Are you using the IPR checker on your repos?
- What is the nature of the topic among these options:
- Core Web technology that can be leveraged in a wide variety of use cases.
- Vertical technology (e.g., health care and life sciences, real estate). If so, what is the argument for standardization at W3C? For example, given the linked data community at W3C, there may be an argument for standardization of a broadly useful linked data specification.
- Horizontal (e.g., sustainability, accessibility, internationalization) that affects work across the consortium? How does this work support the W3C mission?
- If CG participants are considering multiple venues, what are the pros and cons of each option?
- What do you perceive as obstacles to success at any of these venues?
- Would dividing up the standardization effort among multiple organizations make sense?
- What is the overlap between Community Group participants and the W3C Membership? In cases where there is little overlap, it can be more challenging to build support among the Membership for the creation of a new Working Group. The W3C staff can help in several ways:
- Working with the CG to understand which W3C Members may become champions for the work.
- Organizing discussions with organizations interested in joining W3C for this work.
- What is the relationship between the CG Specification and other work streams at W3C?
- Is there an existing Working Group that would make a reasonable home for the CG Specification?
- Are there other Community Groups working on similar projects? Does it make sense for several CGs to work together as a way to gain more support from the broader Membership?
- Whare are the perceived barriers to starting a W3C Working Group?
- Enhancement in development: Traditionally within W3C, Working Group participation has been reserved for W3C Members and Invited Experts. We seek to change this practice so that non-Member CG participants who have made significant contributions to a CG Specification are invited to participate at no cost in the Working Group that takes up the CG Specification, provided that the individual’s employer makes an organizational-level commitment to the W3C Working Group for that same Specification.
CG Chairs are also encouraged to familiarize themselves with the W3C Process for creating a Working Group and the operational details of chartering a Working Group.
- What are the confidentiality policies of the SDO? This may have an impact on revision management strategies.
- Does W3C have a liaison with any of the other SDOs?
- See Are IPR commitments in place? when requesting publication on the Rec Track.
It is important that participants be aware of how IPR flows when the Specification is transferred to a W3C Working Group or another SDO.
Note: This document is informative only; please consult W3C IPR policies for authoritative information.
CG participants agree to the terms of the Contributor Licensing Agreement (CLA) for Specifications developed by the CG. Contributors to a Specification agree to license (“perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free”) their Contributions to parties who make use of those Contributions as part of implementing the Specification.
Under the CLA, Contributors also agree that if the CG Specification is taken up by a W3C Working Group, the Contributions remain available under similar licensing for parties who make use of an eventual W3C Recommendation that includes the Contributions. In other words, if standardization happens within W3C, parties do not need to ask for any new commitments from Contributors to the CG Specifications; their commitments carry forward (by default) to a future Working Group.
Receiving SDOs should review the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement to determine what they need in terms of copyright and patent licenses from Contributors.
The W3C staff can help identify significant Contributors to a CG Specification (through tooling), but typically the editor(s) of a CG Specification and Chairs have a good sense of who contributes text to a Specification.
It is also useful to consider the following IPR topics:
- Because the CG participants have already granted a non-exclusive license for the CG Specification, they cannot issue an exclusive license to other parties. W3C can, in the future, still take up the work in a Working Group (although it might not choose to do so for social / liaison reasons).
- Will Contributors be asked to transfer ownership of their Contributions to another entity? In that case, what rights will Contributors retain about their Contributions? This may have an impact on revision management strategies.
- Does the other SDO have robust IPR and other legal policies in place to support further development of the specifications?
- What is the policy of the other SDO in terms of reuse of material in a Community Group (for example, if the CG were to work on a subsequent revision of a Specification and would want to incorporate revisions made by the SDO)?
- Is there a memorandum of understanding or other agreement between W3C and the other SDO on transfer of W3C-incubated specifications? If so, will the transfer follow the terms of such agreement?
- ISO-specific Consideration: W3C is a PAS Submitter to ISO, but only for Recommendations. That is: one way to transfer a CG Specification to ISO is to launch a W3C Working Group to develop a Recommendation, then use the PAS process to submit it to ISO.
- Are the Community Group participants prepared to hand change control for the CG Specification over to a standards group?
- What is the Community Group’s expectation about continuing to work on the topic after handing off the CG Specification for standardization?
- For example, a Community Group might a venue for developers to provide feedback and express concerns, while a Working Group might focus on standardization of the specification.
- Do the Community Group and the potential venue for standardization share expectations about how revisions will be handled?
- From a W3C perspective, it is acceptable for a "twinned" Community Group to continue to incubate new material relative to a Specification that it has handed off to a standards group (a W3C Working Group or other SDO).
- In this case, clear communication about “what is being standardized” and “what is being incubated” is critical to avoid market confusion.