Identifying future work – what should be our process for considering new work
By Ding Wei (AB, Huawei), Philippe Le Hégaret (W3C)
See also the slides.
Transcript
And the last item on today's AC meeting agenda is about exploring the future work for W3C.
And this topic will be led by Ding Wei from the Advisory Board, as well as Philippe Le Hégaret, the W3C strategy team lead, as well as project lead.
Let's welcome Philippe, and Wei.
Alright, so one of the things that we want you to talk about at this W3C meeting is new work.
The subject of incubation is one of the priorities from the AB.
And now that we are going to have a vision pretty soon, we need to make sure that we have a strategy to implement this vision, and how do we identify new work out there, as well on that.
So where does new work come from nowadays?
So we all know we have community groups.
But with 179 community groups to monitor, it's not always easy to track.
So, for example, I mentioned earlier today, that we're going to start the work on a charter, because the FedID CG told us, that they were using that, and we found the idea interesting.
We were not directly involved in that work ourself.
But, that's an example of things that are happening in CGs and we do not track all of them, unfortunately.
Things are also getting discussed in TPAC breakouts.
That's only a once-a-year type of event.
If we didn't have a family, we would all be actually spending all of our time at TPAC, all year long.
But we would go mad pretty fast on that.
And very often, you know, it's not clear what the followup from those TPAC breakout sessions are, as well.
From time to time, we haven't done so lately, but the team has been organizing workshops.
So far they have been only proposed by the team on that.
We do not have any workshops in the pipeline, at the moment, coming up.
New work can also come from within working groups, or interest groups, or business groups.
And sometimes it's within the scope of the working group.
So it's kinda like, well, we'll just work on it, when they have a new idea on that.
Sometime we have members approaching the W3C staff, saying, “Why don't you guys work on this?
” Who is actually, you know, you realize something is happening over there, you should pay attention to it, but also the outside trends, buzz words.
And that's certainly, you know, attracting attention.
AI is a great example of that, with ChatGPT, and so on, that certainly put a new light on this space for quite some time.
And we catch some of those trends from press articles, social networks, all type of technologies.
And certainly other places that are not on this slide, where actually, where the new work is potentially coming from.
So once we know that there is new work to be done, what happens to it?
And, well as I mentioned earlier, if this new work falls within the scope of an existing working group, we simply direct either the community, the W3C member, to that working group, to say “Well guess what?
“There is a working group “that has been working in this space.
“You should go and talk to them.” So, for example, three months ago, I was in China, and there were discussions about like the haptic API, and I was like, oh that was something that came up like 10 years ago, something like that around the web apps.
And apparently they discussed about it earlier this week, and it could be added in the scope, if I understand that correctly on that.
So it's great when we can find an existing working group that fits within their scope, who is interested to work on it.
When that's not the case, this hopefully ends up at the minimum, into our incubation pipeline, the funnel, as is sometimes being mentioned on that.
So we basically open an issue over there, and at least we have a record of like, yeah, this crossed our radar as well.
The problem with the pipeline is that it's a vast mix of unclassified issues, and it's been accumulating over the years.
It's really hard to follow, as well.
No matter how many times I spend to explain on it, it is hard to follow, and it has to be rethought on that.
But you know, the reality is, you know, it is sometimes a black hole for ideas, and you'll find there are plenty of ideas that had no follow up.
And with all of those things also, how do we prioritize?
You know, very often, it's like we find someone in the staff who's interested in it, and that helps our self.
And then we also use our judgment calls.
You know, do we have interest from multiple parties?
Are we going to get multiple implementation for the work?
What about the IPR situation?
Can we actually move into that space?
No royalty-free for those?
All of those factors can act as filters, when we receive ideas as well on that.
And I'm sure that there are other ideas.
So what can we do?
One of the thing that we've been thinking, and keep in mind, it is very early, we are very interested in your feedback, and I'll come back to that, is that, you know, we need to keep monitoring the outside trends, and some of them could be happening through our liaisons as well.
Today, we have liaisons from groups to groups.
We encourage technical liaison, to be directly from groups to groups.
Very rarely, you know, with some exception, we will long engage at the organization level liaison.
I mean a great example of that, and we haven't been doing enough of it, is our liaison with the IETF.
We have similar relationship with ISO.
On that, in general, we encourage direct technical liaison between the working groups, as close as possible to where the work is getting done.
But if you ask me, “Do we have an entire vision of all of the liaisons, and their status and so on,” we do not have a liaison report available today on that.
So it's hard to know what the other organizations are doing.
We can certainly improve how members, how even the TAG can propose new work, potential workshops, and groups as well.
Maybe we should organize some regular insights workshops, or reports.
That would help the focus, and prioritization as well.
We need to allow the community overall, to propose new work, and track its progress.
And certainly it's not just giving them a pointer to a GitHub a repository, and letting the idea die over there.
So we need to improve our pipeline UI, we need filtering, we need, I mean if there is no follow up of an idea, that should time out, and basically the idea is not getting any traction on that.
And we need to improve the overall flow as well, on how those ideas get moved on along the idea.
And here, you know, the community group might actually be helpful to be created to help move along those ideas.
And in terms of prioritization, getting more involvement from the TAG, and potential AB as well, to help the team on the prioritization of technical ideas, could be also considered.
So, to expand a bit more on this idea of community groups, as a placeholder and, and a pipeline, you know, one thing we could do is, any new work that we're thinking to bring on should be brought to this community group for discussion.
Right now, we are having weekly calls inside the team, about those type of things, but we need to expand the circle, obviously, on that, you know, being able to identify new trends, being able to, you know, if there is a proposed workshop, you know, providing a forum for people to come, and propose workshops as well.
Also helping the incubation work which is happening, which very often sometimes people don't know how to actually move things forward as well, or directing the community with interesting incubating ideas, to the right community group, as well.
And reviewing, and helping the maintenance of the strategy pipeline over time, would also be helpful.
And I already mentioned prioritization on that.
Thanks Philippe.
Good afternoon.
My name is Ding Wei.
I'm now serving on the W3C AB. Remember, in the AC meeting this May, some of you AC members asked a question, whether and how W3C could continue to fulfill its commitment to lead the web to its potential, with embracing the new and emerging technologies.
So we hear that, and we tackle it seriously.
So in the AB strategic planning meeting, we designed a program called Exploring New Horizons and I volunteered to chair this task force.
And then this task force has got very clear objectives: it tries to identify upcoming technology trends, and help bring the new tech to incubation.
And we want to, based on our principles, based on our scope, to identify them as the incubation technologies for this community.
And we want to work with the team, and we want to bring these ideas to the AC meeting this spring.
So thanks to Phillippe, we sit together to bring our idea out.
You heard what Philippe is talking.
We want to set up some new schemes, for example the GitHubs, possibly some regular calls, and we try to use some schemes to help our communities, try to catch the new technologies we don't want to miss.
We want this community to still make sense, in its very fast growing technologies.
So thank you Philippe.
So there are two related breakouts on this topic, by the way, tomorrow.
One is on challenges with incubation, led by Chris Wilson.
I will also lead technical roadmap at W3C breakout tomorrow, as well.
So, you know, in terms of new work that could be followed on, nothing is actually, there is always things, I was meeting actually this morning with the social web committee group, about update to activity pub, Web3 certainly has been a topic, which has been coming on and off, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, on that.
As a reminder, there are resources available in our guide, on how to incubate, transition from a community group to a working group, and also whether your technology is ready as well.
I wanted to remind the committee about that.
And on this, we are done.
(audience applauding)
