Closed chaals closed 1 year ago
I would expect that only under extraordinary circumstances would the Team raise a "Team Confidential FO".
"Team Confidential" in this case clearly needs to expand to include the members of the specific FO Council.
Given that, I would defer to that Council to determine whether that FO should remain confidential or request a less-confidential variant be published, along with its Council Report.
Ah, nice catch. I think I get what the Process is trying to do, but I agree it isn't doing it quite right just yet.
There's a bit of subtlety around what is confidential: the FO itself, or the decision against which it is filed. It is possible to raise Team-only or Member-only Objections against less confidential decisions. The Process already says (in 5.5 Registering Formal Objections) that “A record of each Formal Objection regarding a publicly-available document must be made publicly available.”
So, there may remain private details of an FO against something public, but the existance and general content of the FO will be known.
In 5.6.2.7. Council Decision Report, it says “Council Reports must have the same level of confidentiality as the Formal Objection.” That seems slightly off, in two ways:
Additional wrinkles:
Here's a pull request that tries to clean up all this: #720
- I think it ought to say that they must be no more confidential than, rather than must be equally confidential to.
The report surely cannot be less confidential than any material it cites or includes. I think that's what forced us to equality? Perhaps the whole idea of FOs having their own confidentiality needs to be dropped; we could insist that an FO has the same confidentiality level as the decision being objected to, as a mismatch in confidentiality levels could be (as this shows) a nightmare.
(I added this as a comment on the PR also. )
we could insist that an FO has the same confidentiality level as the decision being objected to, as a mismatch in confidentiality levels could be (as this shows) a nightmare.
That is already dealt with for confidential FOs on public documents, as the Team is required to go through https://www.w3.org/2021/Process-20211102/#confidentiality-change for those. And this part of the PR tries to generalize that to other confidentiality mismatches
The Revising W3C Process CG just discussed Should a team-confidential formal objection lead to a team-confidential council report?
, and agreed to the following:
RESOLVED: Merge PR #720 as-is
As I read the last sentence of https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/Drafts/#council-decision it seems that a team-confidential objection would result in a team-confidential Council Report.
That doesn't seem right.