Selection Process

Introduction

W3C gained ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS submitter status in Oct 2010 (PAS for short in this document), and has since developed a process to select which of its 150+ Recommendations should become ISO/IEC standards, in which order, and using what sort of packaging.

Our two first PAS (Web Services and WAI/WCAG) were approved “live” by the W3C AC at its March 2010 plenary meeting, and handled on an ad-hoc basis in the coming months, together with our initial PAS status proposal.

With that status in hand and those two packages already taken up, we need an internal process for handling potential future candidates out of our long list of Recommendations.

The goal of this document is to:

• present a conceptual framework for this activity
• propose a selection process and associated selection criteria

Conceptual Framework

There are contexts where having the de-jure standard imprimatur is likely to increase adoption of W3C specifications. For instance, beyond the W3C brand, a larger audience may be familiar with the ISO and IEC brands. Furthermore, there are also contexts where it is mandatory to use ISO/IEC standards or their national transposition by legislation, for instance in some government procurement.

W3C also has experience where lack of coordination among standards bodies results in fragmentation. The PAS process can be seen as a mechanism for better coordination between different standardization cultures, all of which seek global interoperability for ICT technologies, but through different means.

It is therefore our goal to maintain an ISO/IEC status allowing our community to select and send particular W3C Recommendations to become International Standards (IS), when the need is clearly expressed. The PAS Submitter status is granted first for a two-year period. Then, if renewed, it’s extended for subsequent five-year periods.

This activity is managed by the W3C staff, more precisely by the Liaisons Task Force, or LiaisonTF, a subset of the W3C team meeting regularly to track our international liaisons and whose scope is essentially all non-technical liaisons with other standard organizations and their committees. The Liaisons TF is led by the Director of Technical Liaisons of the consortium.

Note

Per the JTC 1 PAS process, we requested to be able to submit specifications that have the scope “Core Web Technologies”. That establishes a baseline of what we may submit: all our RECs, but it is important to note that the goal of the W3C PAS activity is not to submit all of the eligible W3C REC below to PAS.

Note that we were asked to choose an ICS (ISO category) and picked up 35.085, Software, Internet. Also note that our IS numbers will be in the range 40001 to 40999.

As the criteria below explain, we intent only to submit specifications of the highest stability and quality, showing no deployment issue, and entering this process with a clear need for ISO/IEC de-jure transposition.

Process and Selection Criteria

The process should be simple and give the right audience the opportunity to evaluate the PAS being proposed and apply the criteria described below. In the spirit of openness, we will accept requests and advises from everybody.

Given the work involved in writing one of those PAS package, a few weeks plus a few months of ballot on the JTC 1 side, we still need to be sure before moving forward with a given new PAS that this is what the community is interested in transposing into IS at this point in time.

Process

1. Initial input/request for a new PAS goes to the Liaisons Task Force, at team-liaisons@w3.org. The source can be anyone.
2. Discussions happen between the various parties involved (WG chairs, WG, staff, PAS Mentor, JTC1 staff, SC chairs, AB, etc) to prepare the next steps or abandon the idea.
3. LiaisonTF (and technical staff in charge of the technology) prepares a PAS note (analysis of criteria, outline, timeline, etc) to be sent to W3M for discussion/approval. A first draft of the JTC 1 PAS Explanatory Report is created.
4. LiaisonTF notifies AB when the ER is ready, and if there is agreement to move forward, announce the intention to submit to ISO (through JTC 1 PAS mentor) and AC (through Comm).
5. Editor(s) finalizes the PAS Explanatory Report, in coordination with technical staff and the JTC 1 PAS mentor; it’s then reviewed by the LiaisonTF for final OK before sending it to JTC 1.
6. SENT to JTC 1 and Comm announces the news to AC
7. When/if approved, 5 months later (plus a couple of weeks to get the ballot started and the final vote results from JTC 1) Comm coordinates with JTC 1 (potential joint press release) and informs the public.

Criteria

The primary driver of the technical Web community is Avoiding fragmentation over conflicting global ICT standards. So we need to look for:

• if it will make a difference in the Government use of the technology, in procurement, vs. local non-interoperable variations of the specification
• if there is a need for Promoting the widespread adoption of our work e.g. when there is competition with similar technologies and ours is more open and better architectured for the Web
• if the spec has gained enough Stability and Acceptance - we should not submit contentious specifications. This doesn’t mean they should all be years old.

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List of potential packages

W3C maintains a list of W3C Recommended technologies and their potential validity as PAS, on the basis of more technical criteria than the above high level considerations.

• The starting point is the list of all our RECs, minus the REC that are test assertions, primer, guidebook, obsoleted, superseded (like HTML 3, or deprecated specs like PICS) or simply not worth PAS, as indicated by the DL/staff, those that will be superseded soon for instance.

Our potential PAS list is currently maintained in Member space.

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PAS Note

Once a proposal is made to the W3C Liaisons team, a short exec summary of the PAS being considered needs to be created, it should talk about:

• Origin of the proposal (who, why now)
• Evaluation of the criteria (stability, gov use/need, adoption)
• What specifications should be sent (just one, or a larger package)
• What JTC 1 group should be the target of the ballot (or should it be sent to JTC 1 directly)
• What IS number in our 40K range to ask for (minus the ones already taken by WS, WCAG, etc)
• What sort of supporting documents are available with the specs (implementation reports, tests, tutorials, etc)
• Has any gov funding/resources been used to develop it (grant, expert gov staff in our WG)
• What other ISO standards are related (in competition or work in complement with the PAS)
• Timing (AB pres, W3M approval, AC notification, proposal ready, proposal sent + ballot 5 months)