W3C Participant Mailing List

[wareid]

This idea has been raised in various venues for the last few weeks, so I want to start gathering input here.

We do not currently have a "W3C Participant" mailing list for all those who are involved in W3C activities. This list could include a variety of people depending on how we define participant, so we might want to settle on that in this discussion. We also need to consider the various email privacy/anti-spam measures out there that govern email communications.

Open questions:

• Who would we include on a "W3C participant" mailing list?
• What do we need to do to kick one off?
• How do we maintain it going forwards (opt-in/out on account creation, maintenance, etc.)?
• Do we need facilitators or even a set of rules for the use and participation on the list?
• What type of content do we want to use the list for?

[cwilso]

In general, I want to state I'm a fan of the idea, but I've heard two things, and we should be clear which (or both) that we're doing:

1. A notification list for all W3C participants, that probably has Team-controlled write access. (I.e. it's not an open list)
2. An open list for any W3C participants to chat in, a la the less formal side of ac-forum (possibly replacing ac-forum).

1 would be interesting, but I think this suggestion is more about 2. The two open questions I would add are:

• how do we ensure participants have consistent respect for each other in this forum?
• what guidelines would we want to have about affiliation?

On the second one of these, I want to be clear that I'm happy with no guidelines, or to discuss any options; As an example, I just don't want there to be a moment of surprise when 20 Google employees show up, and 5-6 of them are relatively frequent interactors. This is of course by definition limited in ac-forum.

[tobie]

If we're discussing (2), is a mailing list even the right tool for the job? There's been various attempts at moving some conversations elsewhere (and have them a little more threaded). Would it be worth revisiting some of those? What are we hoping to achieve with this? To be clear, I'm not against this idea at all, I'm just trying to uncover a shared outcome.

[chrisn]

I agree, I would suggest we look at other tools than mailing lists. I suspect that the medium is part of the reason ac-forum discussions end up the way they do. And also starting with clarifying some objectives.

[cwilso]

Though I agree with your concerns about mailing lists, I would also encourage that we pair up some kind of free-form discussion - perhaps that's "office hours"/"chat room" synchronous meetings or something, but I think (from anecdotal evidence) that strictly threaded things keep things on track, but might be less approachable for new people?

[chaals]

Agreeing with @cwilso that I undestand this discussion to be about a general, open mailing list to discuss the work of W3C, that seems basically what https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/ is for. If we want a mailing list, I suggest we already have one.

@cwislo also wrote

The two open questions I would add are:

• how do we ensure participants have consistent respect for each other in this forum?
• what guidelines would we want to have about affiliation?

For the first, I believe the effective answer is "list moderators, working based on some explanation of what we expect".

I leave the answer to the second question to the AC, but suggest the point of an open mailing list is that the strongest rule about affiliation should probably be requesting that people state theirs.

(FWIW I am not convinced that the medium is the problem leading to rambling discussions and a lack of decision-making.)

[igarashi50]

From a different perspective, I would like to comment that in many member organizations (especially in large companies), it is difficult for employees to speak freely, and I also have heard that even in the AC-Forum, AC reps are hesitant to speak as AC representatives, even though they have opinions.

If we expect free discussion as the opinion of individual W3C participants, wouldn't it be better to encourage them to speak without any particular rules, e.g. using www-talk as @chaals mentioned ? What to do with moderation and faciliate positive interaction may be an issue, but I don't think it would be so bad if it were a free discussion.

If you expect to hear a representative opinion of the member organizations about W3C, we should take advantage of the AC-forum. Also, as several people have mentioned, Maillist is not a good tool for in-depth discussion,s and you need to take steps such as migragting to a discussion on github reps, etc. However, there are limits to what can be decided by various large groups of people, and I think it would be good to use an AC-Forum or community discussion, e.g.w3c-tallk and their related github repos as venues to escalate discussions to AB, TAG, BOD, Team, etc.

I think who can particiate the discussion of AC-forum ML and Member-only github repos is another issue from the W3C community discussion.

[frivoal]

I am not a fan of an open mailing list for all w3c participants (or open to the whole world).

• If we mean a list to which anyone can subscribed (though isn't by default), we already have that, as chaals pointed out. Very few people do subscribe. It used to have a lot of traffic, but that has decreased to zero. Presumably, that's not really what people are looking for.
• If we mean a list to which every W3C Member employee and every IE is subscribed by default, I expect a lot of backlash. Most people do not want to be subscribed to an active free-for-all mailing list with thousands of people in it.
• ac-forum is somewhat unfortunate in that it leaves out some voices which have relevant things to say. But every W3C Member already has a voice (well, two: AC Rep, and AC-Rep alternate). I am sure that there are a few more Member employees who would be useful additions, and that we're missing out. But if we open it up to all Member employees, we have to recognize that companies with many employees will vastly outnumber others. In Working Groups, I think this is manageable and healthy: we have a clear technical scope, and if 10 employees of company X are actually working on this, it is beneficial for everyone else to have access to these 10 people. And we have active chairing. In a open-scope forum where discussions are primarily political, and without an active chair (nor an obvious way to chair email-based discussions), I would be a lot more worried about smaller voices being crowded out. The current sent up, with up to 2 per member companies, plus a few more individuals based having been elected, while possibly not theoretically ideal, strikes me as a very practical compromise.
• We already have other means for the whole membership to discuss things. GitHub (an in particular https://github.com/w3c/AB-memberonly/issues) is read-write accessible by everybody, and is a lot more conductive to focused discussions: it's easy to only look the threads which are interesting to you without being flooded by piles of unrelated messages. And being issue focused, it's more action oriented, and things can be brought to a close.

With that said, I do support there being various ways for everybody to get in touch with everybody else. We already have github. We do have slack too (though I wish we could have some open-standards based alternative). Maybe we could generalize w3c.social to everyone with a w3c account (possibly allowing proxying of another account if they have one and would rather not have too). Maybe we could have an index of every w3c participant listing means to contact them. I'm not against more experimentation about communication tools. I'm just not convinced that an open-scope mailing list of a few thousand people is going to do any good.

[martinthomson]

There has to be a set of rules and there has to be a purpose.

A code of conduct that is enforced is absolutely essential or you get what the IETF has. I don't participate there for a few reasons, but that is high on the list.

A purpose also helps. That could be broad, but it can't be "no rules". One potential purpose would be to facilitate broader feedback on the future of the consortium, it's mission, and procedures.

The effect that I've observed in other places is that there is a very sharp probability distribution. Those who are engaging on this issue, for instance, already fall into the top 1% of those who contribute to other similar forums. That is unlikely to change with a fresh venue. So the question I have is: what would you do to correct for that?

(Thomas Narten famously started sending detailed reports about who was using their posting privileges to the IETF mailing lists. I think that the idea was to shame those who posted too often or too voluminously. That failed to have the desired effect, but it has fallen into a weird tradition that continues today. Please, if this happens, do not replicate that mistake.)

[wareid]

1. A notification list for all W3C participants, that probably has Team-controlled write access. (I.e. it's not an open list)
2. An open list for any W3C participants to chat in, a la the less formal side of ac-forum (possibly replacing ac-forum).

Thanks @cwilso for focusing this a little better!

I think discussion on this in the past has flip-flopped between both options. In the case of 1, we need something that allows communication with the whole community but on a limited basis, like for announcements and news. So I don't want that part to get lost.

For 2, I think everyone has stated all the reasons this becomes difficult. We want a forum where everyone can interact, discuss things, and that is open to the community. That also carries challenges we have seen in places like IETF and AC Forum. Part of those challenges are related to conduct, some of those challenges relate to the medium. Moderation takes work, but it is something we're already looking at for AC-forum and could extend to a wider list. We have alternatives (i.e. Slack) but even that is not well suited for our purpose.

I had a laugh to myself as I briefly considered suggesting an old-fashioned web forum page, where people could create posts and interact on topics they did care about, and we could focus discussions a little more easily than with email. There is an option we all already have access to, and W3C team has controls for, and I wonder if it's worth experimenting with: GitHub Discussions. It offers some of that "threading" we are looking for, and it's something we already have access too with our projects, and we have ways to manage access through existing channels.

Even as a brief experiment, it might be interesting?

[tobie]

Also, beyond the medium, there's a real need for facilitation / community management (see https://github.com/w3c/AB-memberonly/issues/163). Discussions need to lead to concrete action. Circular discussions and discussions that come to clear conclusions but then aren't executed on create disappointment and ultimately disengagement. Facilitation / community management helps with by bringing closure and also managing expectations.

[chaals]

I had a laugh to myself as I briefly considered suggesting an old-fashioned web forum page, where people could create posts and interact on topics they did care about, and we could focus discussions a little more easily than with email. There is an option we all already have access to, and W3C team has controls for, and I wonder if it's worth experimenting with: GitHub Discussions. It offers some of that "threading" we are looking for, and it's something we already have access too with our projects, and we have ways to manage access through existing channels.

Discourse is a modern-ish version of this too. That we've tried.

I see no way around moderation. It's well-known drawback is that what gets moderated by whom is a control point that you can't eliminate by some desire for it to be perfect (which it inevitably won't).

Perhaps we should be thinking hard not about the medium, but about what messages are controlled... I think it is really important as @tobie says above that discussions lead to concrete action.

Between those discussion and action, I think it's valuable to have a decision-making function. In W3C Working Groups this is what chairs (and Team contacts) do - and the check on their use of that power is their ability to convince the relevant community that they really have identified and declared the consensus. (I've been a chair, and that particular task is at least as hard as moderating, which is also something chairs do in W3C Working Groups).

I think it is also important to ensure that the discussions are relevant to the community. In Working Groups we have charters that set some scope, and again, chairs and Team contacts moderate that in day-to-day operation. That's possibly even harder, because the web is important to an amazingly diverse community for an amazingly diverse collection of reasons. Considering the right medium is likely to be helpful, but enabling active moderation that gains trust is also IMHO crucial for this aspect.