How to Organize a Last Call Review

Note: This document has been superseded by How to Organize a Recommendation Track Transition.

A Last Call Working Draft is a special instance of a Working Draft that is considered by the Working Group to fulfill the relevant requirements of its charter and any accompanying requirements documents. A Last Call Working Draft is a public technical report for which the Working Group seeks technical review from other W3C groups, W3C Members, and the public.

- Section 5.2 Last Call Working Draft of the 19 July 2001 W3C Process Doc

The Working Group follows these steps to prepare for the last call review.

1. The Chair ensures that the Working Group decision to go to last call is documented (e.g., in the minutes of the teleconference when the decision was made, or by a special email from the Chair to the Working Group).
2. The Working Group estimates which W3C Working Groups and other parties should review the last call draft. It is preferable to secure review commitments before announcing the last call. From the 12 Apr 1999 Hypertext CG teleconference: "Two weeks before last call, relevant CG's should be asked to discuss dependencies and schedule reviews." For the last call of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, the Working Group maintained a list of committed and invited reviewers and dependent Working Groups. This supporting document provides easy reference to the complete list of reviewers and their comments (or decision not to review the specification).
3. The document editors include an appropriate document status in the public last call Working Draft.
4. The Team contact ensures that a public mailing list exists or is created for last call comments.
5. The Editors or Team contact send a publication request to the Web Team.
6. Once the document has been published, the Chair or Team contact announces the last call.

If the review demonstrates that there is consensus in the community, the next step is to request to advance the document to Candidate Recommendation, or Proposed Recommendation if there is adequate implementation experience.

If the review demonstrates that there is not consensus in the community, the Chair and Team contact should arrange to discuss this with the Domain and Activity leads.

Last call status section

See requirements of pubrules.

The last call status section should contain the following information:

• A link to the Working Group decision to go to last call (which may be a Members-only link).
• A link to a public patent discolsure page (even when zero disclosures) per pubrules (see announcement to chairs).
• Advance indication of entrance criteria for Proposed Recommendation.
• If proposing to advance directly to Proposed Recommendation status, the document status must indicate what special entrance criteria have been satisfied in order to do so.

The last call status section may include:

• A link to priority feedback items. Please note that the entry condition for last call is that all issues have been resolved.
• A link to a page of known errors or issues already raised during the review period. @@ does this make sense? --Reagle@@

Here is a sample last call status section, adapted from the 26 June 2002 SOAP Version 1.2 Part 0: Primer

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. The latest status of this document series is maintained at the W3C.

This is the W3C Last Call Working Draft of the SOAP Version 1.2 Part 0: Primer for review by W3C members and other interested parties. It has been produced by the XML Protocol Working Group (WG), which is part of the Web Services Activity.

A list of open Last Call issues against this document can be found at http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/ Group/xmlp-lc-issues.

Comments on this document should be sent to xmlp-comments@w3.org (public archives).Comments should be sent during the last call review period, which ends on 19 July 2002.

Discussion of this document takes place on the public <xml-dist-app@w3.org> mailing list (Archives) per the email communication rules in the XML Protocol Working Group Charter.

Patent disclosures relevant to this specification may be found on the Working Group's patent disclosure page.

This is a public W3C Working Draft. It is a draft document and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C Working Drafts as reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress".

A list of all W3C technical reports can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/

How to Announce the last call review

Once the public last call Working Draft is linked from the Technical Reports page, the Chair or Team Contact announces the beginning of the review with email to chairs@w3.org (Members-only archive). An announcement should also be sent to the WG mailing list and other lists to encourage public feedback.

Do not announce the review before publishing the last call Working Draft. Do not publish the draft until you are ready to send the announcement. The publication should precede the announcement only by a small amount of time.

The announcement must include the following information:

• That this is a last call announcement.
• The review period end date. The review period start date is the date of the announcement and the document publication date should be the same.
• The email address for comments.
• The document's title, address, and publication date.
• The list of dependent Working Groups (and other parties) invited (or committed) to review the document.
• A link to a public patent public disclosure page.

The announcement should contain the following information:

• A link to the decision to go to last call (which may be a Members-only link).
• A list of priority feedback items and/or minority opinions on decisions.

The announcement may contain the following information:

• Editors' names.

Here are some examples of last call announcements. Some of the older calls are missing an enumeration of dependencies and reviewers.

• 12 Jul 2002 Last Call Announcement for DOM Events
• 26 Jun 2002 XML Protocol WG's Last Call for Review of SOAP 1.2
• 17 Dec 1999 Ruby Annotation last call
• 5 Nov 1999 User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 last call
• 13 May 1999 XHTML Last last call Steven Pemberton
• 12 Apr 1999 Last Call for the XML Fragment Interchange Rec Paul Grosso
• 5 Nov 1998 Last Call for Web CGM Profile Josef Dietl
• 3 Nov 1998 W3C RDF Schema Specification Version 1 enters last call singer@almaden.ibm.com
• 9 Oct 1998 RDF Model and Syntax last call Miller,Eric
• 29 Sep 1998 "Namespaces in XML": last call Dan Connolly

Last Call Issue tracking

While the Working Group mailing list should be the definitive archive of issues raised and their resolutions, an issue tracking mechanism is useful for presenting a summary to the Director in a meeting to decide whether to advance to Candidate Recommendation. Some examples of last call tracking include:

• Table of UAGL 1.0 issues (which includes last call issues) and the linear version of the UAGL 1.0 issues list
• Table of issues raised during WCAG 1.0 last call and the linear version of WCAG 1.0 last call issues.

A Working Group should resolve all last call issues before calling for review of a revised document (see process issues 136). The Advisory Board believed it would cause confusion to have more than one version of a document under review simultaneously.