WCAG20/Institutional Memory
One major reason that the WCAG Working Group has continued to be chartered, since the publication of WCAG 2.0, was so the people involved in maintaining support materials would be part of the group recollection of key decisions that led to the guidelines being as they are. However, the group has experienced constant gradual turnaround of its membership since WCAG 2.0 was published, and recently had a change of chairs. These changes mean that present participants have less access to group institutional memory than in the past. It is important that as the group maintains its support materials and begins to consider requirements for potential new normative deliverables, the discussion history be retrievable so the current membership doesn't unknowingly change important past decisions.
Therefore we are embarking on a process to collect and document the institutional memory that is available from the current participants. The process to do this will probably evolve; this survey is the first experiment. We anticipate this will be a standing agenda item for the next few months until we consider the task complete, but will limit the time devoted to it each week so the group can continue to focus on other work.
There are a variety of resources, beyond your own recollection, that may inform your answers. It is not an expectation that you will look through old resources to inform your thoughts. However, if you do have recollection of specific discussions, draft documents, etc., it would be helpful if you can point to them. Even if you only can remember approximate dates and where the information might be archived, it will be helpful. Resources that may be relevant include:
- Minutes of WCAG teleconferences (note this page may not capture all meetings but is a good starting point);
- The WCAG Wiki that was maintained by Trace;
- The Bugzilla database from which we did much of our comment processing that was maintained by Trace;
- The W3C comment tracker which was used for some of our comment processing;
- Old drafts of WCAG and the support materials - currently findable by following "previous version" links in sequence from the current version; we may provide an index if helpful.
- What are Success Criteria, and how to write them Started [from David's article]
- WCAG_2.x_Priority_levels_discussion
- Principle 1
- Principle 2
- Principle 3
- Principle 4
- Conformance
- Glossary
- Key Concepts