Managing changes to proposed charters when GitHub is used

[tidoust]

I originally raised this on the Comm team mailing-list (team-only link), but here seems a good place for that discussion.

It seems common (and good!) practice these days to use a GitHub repository to prepare draft WG charters, either directly within the w3c/charter-drafts repo, or using a dedicated repository as done for the Second Screen WG Charter.

When doing so, the URL sent to the Advisory Committee for review typically looks like https://w3c.github.io/[foo].

When substantive changes are made to the proposed charter after AC review, section 5.3 of the How to create a WG or IG page in the Guide book requires the staff:

1. Mint a new URI for the version of the charter that includes the changes. In the "About" section of the charter, please link to the original (reviewed) charter.
2. Modify the original charter in place with the following status sentence at the top: "This charter has been superseded as a result of Advisory Committee Review; please see the [revised charter]".

While it's easy to track changes made to a proposed Charter on GitHub, there is no easy way to mint a new URI in that case: https://w3c.github.io/[foo] will always return the latest version. Unless we want to enforce stable snapshots there, I would suggest to extend the section with something along the lines of:

Alternatively, the original charter may be modified in place to link to the history of changes with the following status sentence at the top: "This charter may have been superseded as a result of Advisory Committee Review or other feedback, please check the [commit history] for details"

[plehegar]

We should look into following the example at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-charters-review/2024Apr/0000.html (or some iteration of that)