xml-dev - RE: sunshine and standards development

[Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]

Title: RE: sunshine and standards development

I don't think it's true that there's never been a rational explanation of the W3C confidentiality policy on this list.  I remember Jonathan Robie explaining it quite clearly last week, and as I recall Lauren Wood jumped in on this the last time xml-dev had a go-around on this subject.

I'm not exactly a rabid defender of the W3C's policies and priorities, but here's the rationale in a nutshell: Sunshine produces heat as well as light.

- The W3C is an industry consortium producing Recommendations for how their members can "lead the web to its greatest potential", not a "standards body".  If you don't like their Recommendations, extend them , ignore parts of them them, start your own organization, go to the ISO, or whatever.  These are all viable options, I'm not sneering ;~)

- Because the W3C is what I like to call a "treaty organization among competitors" rather than a dispassionate standards body, there is immense potential for the information revealed as part of the working group process to be used to the detriment of various participants.  The example of the potential effect of a company's statements on its stock price has been mentioned recently (by Jonathan?).  For example, let's say for example that someone wrote to a working group "Proposed Feature X is unacceptable to our company; we simply don't have the resources to implement it in our products." Some sharp-eyed stock analyst reading the W3C mailing lists could say, "Hmm, those bozos are too stupid to implement a feature that the Big Boys are going to insist on; let's short their stock!".   I assure you that the WG member would be told (by the CEO whose stock options just lost several million dollars in value) to never, ever say anything meaningful on a W3C mailing list ever again.  Less extreme examples are even more plausible... I think we could all imagine dueling press releases from Oracle and Microsoft (or whoever) touting the superiority of *their* proposals to the W3C. The net result of all this "sunshine" would be the drying up of all information flows within the W3C.

- Finally, technical details *are* released from Working Groups regularly; they are released in a controlled manner, however, to prevent the kind of chaos described above.  Granted, all this illusion of consensus and the "authoritative, not discursive" tone of documents that the W3C encourages hides a lot of interesting information, but without the confidentiality rules, that information would never have been exchanged in the first place.

Reasonable people can obviously disagree on any or all of this.  The way I see it, the W3C's proper niche is trying to "incubate" specs via the active cooperation of the major players in the Internet industry.  Eliminating the confidentiality rules would push it either in the IETF direction of greater  openness, but little "authoritative" participation by the major companies ... or in the ISO direction of codifying accepted practice rather than incubating new technologies.  Given that the IETF and ISO are already out there, doing their jobs reasonably effectively, do you really want to drive the W3C out of *its* niche by eliminating the confidentiality guidelines?

-----Original Message-----
From:   Matthew Gertner [SMTP:matthew@praxisxml.com]
Sent:   Monday, October 16, 2000 9:35 AM
To:     xml-dev@xml.org
Cc:     'simonstl@simonstl.com'
Subject:        RE: sunshine and standards development

While I think that we all recognize the extremely valuable work done by the
W3C, what really irks me is that there doesn't seem to be any indication
from the organization itself that it considers these criticisms to have any
validity whatsoever, or that it would ever be prepared to change in any way.
Come on guys, even a little smoke and mirrors along these lines would have
great PR value. There's *a lot* of space between the current W3C model and,
say, IETF, so a bit more open-mindedness would surely lead to improvements
in the way the W3C is run.

My personal biggest beef, as with many others I gather, is the
confidentiality policy. It should be recognized that there are alternatives
to complete openness and complete closedness. The current policy is just
stupid. Sorry, but I've never heard anything approaching a rational
explanation for why a W3C member can't discuss a technical detail with a
knowledgeable non-member. This is to the detriment not only of the W3C, but
of Internet users in general. And this is quite a large group to let down.