Yeah, this is something we're working on taking care of. Right now the challenge is: - There are a few proposals for working groups with very little consensus among the community around any of them - Most of the working group proposals are still drafts - Mike Jones has a thread going with other specs council members about how we need to respond to these proposals - The specs council does not currently have a mailing list and there is a struggle between creating another low traffic list versus using an existing list. I've been asked to make a list, which I can do, though there is little to no consensus that we should do so
I then personally have a larger struggle with the process in place. I strongly believe that it does not do good for OpenID to have it pushed in divergent technical directions (we've seen what happened with 2.0 as it tried to please everyone) though feel that the community has very little power to prevent that. While I could drive toward consensus on the specs@ mailing list that a proposal still needs changes to fit along with the direction of OpenID, technically the specs council would be hard pressed to use that as a reason to not approve a working group. The specs council is given a list of four reasons that it can not approve a new working group. To take a lack of consensus on the specs@ mailing list as input, it would have to decide either "that the proposal contravenes the OpenID community’s purpose" (where the Foundation says "OpenID is a set of freely available enabling technologies that facilitate individuals to use their identity and profile from one web resource to access many others in a decentralized, secure, and easy fashion built upon existing web technologies.") or "that the proposed WG does not have sufficient support to succeed or to deliver proposed deliverables within projected completion dates." While significant part of the technical community might disagree with a working group proposal, I don't see there being a way (as a member of the specs council) to in good faith decide that it contravenes the purpose or except in extremely grave cases that it would not succeed. From there the proposal goes to a vote of the membership which is structured in such a way as to pass with a quorum requirement of 20% of the membership or 20 members, whichever is greater, and a simple majority vote. Beyond all of that, the quickest that a working group can be formed is no more than 15 days of review by the specs council (which we're failing at right now), plus a 14 day notice period of the membership vote, plus a 7 day voting period. This thus means that by our current process it takes approximately a month for new work to begin. From there, the fastest that a working group could produce a final specification is theoretically 120 days. The IPR Process requires a review period of at least 60 days (which PAPE is going through right now) for a final specification. From there, assuming that no one objects around IPR or the board for legal liability, a 45 day review period for the membership of the Foundation is started which results in a 14 day voting period to approval the specification and officially call it "OpenID <something>". This thus means that from the day the working group feels they have their final draft, it will take 119 days (~4 months) for the specification to go through all of the needed IPR review steps. I know that I was intimately involved in creating this process but the more that I see it in practice, the more that I know we must change it and understand why new innovative work like the OpenID and OAuth Hybrid occurs outside the purview of the OpenID Foundation. (And yes, I understand how I'm being a bit hypocritical by saying that getting started should be easier yet only for the work that a core group feels fits into what OpenID is which can be done in many different ways.) I guess my point is that we need to make it much easier to get started, though make sure it is hard for something to be called "OpenID" when it clearly doesn't use existing OpenID technology or does something wildly different. Right now our process is loaded up at the start and at the end, which means that people are going and starting elsewhere. --David On Dec 17, 2008, at 8:09 AM, Scott Kveton wrote: >> It might not be the board issue, but there are several WG proosals >> sitting there. According to the OpenID process, spec comittee needs >> issue a recomendatiom within two weeks so that the working group >> creation voting can take place. > > Is this something for the specifications council?: > > http://wiki.openid.net/OpenID_Foundation/SC > > I believe this is out of scope for the Exec. Committee. > > - Scott > > > > > >> =...@tokyo via iPhone >> >> On 2008/12/18, at 0:41, "Scott Kveton" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Unless anyone has anything particularly pressing to discuss, I'd >>> like >>> to cancel the Executive Committee meeting scheduled for tomorrow at >>> 11am PST. >>> >>> If there is something you'd like to discuss and still feel like we >>> need a meeting, by all means, let me know and we can rethink. >>> >>> FYI, >>> >>> - Scott >>> _______________________________________________ >>> board mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board >> _______________________________________________ >> board mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board >> > _______________________________________________ > board mailing list > [email protected] > http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board _______________________________________________ board mailing list [email protected] http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
