Can WGs request the W3C team to negotiate technical agreements with liaison organizations?

[murata2makoto]

In my understanding of 9. Liaisons, nobody other than the W3C team can negotiate technical agreements with liaison organizations. Moreover, there are no mechanisms for WGs or W3C members to request the W3C team to start such negotiations. Thus, the W3C team always has the power to reject any possible technical agreements. I think that this is against the spirit of recent changes to the W3C process document.

[nigelmegitt]

Please could you highlight the problematic wording?

I cannot see any text that prevents WGs or Members from requesting that the Team begins arranging a liaison. I agree that the coordination role means that if a liaison seems to be problematic then the Team can simply not allow it to proceed, but I would expect some explanation.

[frivoal]

(speaking in theory only, I am not personnaly aware of a real problematic case).

I suspect a problematic case would be if you ask the Team to set up a liaison with some group. If they eplicitely reject your request, that's an observable Team decision, and you should be able to formally object, and get a hearing about it. But if they ignore you, or reply in a non-committal way ? Since there's no official process demanding an answer, it is a possibility, and in that case it's kind of hard to know how to follow up.

[TallTed]

It seems to me that this is not limited to requests for liaison, but is about any request of the Team. There ought to be some reasonable time from submission of such a request, following which a (formally objectable) decision (SHOULD? MUST?) be explicitly returned, lacking which explicit return, the (formally objectable) decision may be inferred, appealed, etc.

[fantasai]

There are a lot of requests we make of the team, from requesting a liaison to fixing a bug in the validator. I really don't think adding formal Process steps for following through within some time limit or whatever is a reasonable thing to do.

If the Team isn't doing something that ought to be done, then raise it to the AB. The AB can formally request things from top-level management, and if top-level management is genuinely intractable, they can raise it to the Board to address in their role of CEO oversight.