Reconsider requirement for AC meetings to be face-to-face

[hober]

(Split off from w3c/AB-public#283)

§ 3.2.4. Advisory Committee Meetings contains the following sentence:

The Team organizes a face-to-face meeting for the Advisory Committee twice a year.

This obliges the Team to organize two AC meetings a year, and it requires those AC meetings to be face-to-face.

In practice, the in-person requirement has been put aside several times over the years. Should this requirement be revisited?

[frivoal]

I feel like including a recognition that it may be virtualized for imperious reasons like the pandemic would be reasonable, and not a big change. Allowing it to be skipped or virtualized without such a reason is another thing altogether. I'd suggest we need AB guidance (likely after AC consultation) before attempting such a change.

[reidmore-online]

I may be missing something, but considering we’ve been able to run virtual face to face meetings over the last few years, and even now most of our “face to face” meetings are hybrid, is it possible we don’t need to change the text, we just need to accept that “face to face” does not by default mean in person?

If we do need to make this explicit, I can only think of benefits to normalizing virtual meetings, it makes them far more accessible, more sustainable, and easier to attend for many.

[hober]

Is it possible we don’t need to change the text, we just need to accept that “face to face” does not by default mean in person?

Interesting idea! I think that would require redefining some terms elsewhere in the Process document; I've filed #1093 to discuss that possibility.

[michaelchampion]

I agree the terminology needs to be clarified -- "face to face" doesn't imply "in person" any more.
As for requiring in-person meetings ...When I first got involved in W3C I had small children/busy partner/demanding job, had worked for years on various remote collaboration tools (using 1980s tech 🫠 ), and was convinced that W3C's in-person meeting culture was burdensome and antiquated. But I soon learned that getting to know people in-person, and re-connecting in person once or twice a year, was a key part of W3C's success back then.

In these times of pandemics, exclusionary politics / increased international tensions, and much better remote meeting tech, it is time to rethink. Clearly there needs to be flexibility to always enable effective remote participation, and cancel in-person meetings occasionally when the outside world makes travel particularly dangerous for some or all members. BUT we need to think hard about deprecating the in-person meetings since they fostered the collaborative culture that W3C once used to be successful and build broad influence networks. Yes it's expensive to host in-person meetings, but its more expensive to hire even more staff to do the consensus facilitation and conflict management that personal relationships help foster.And more expensive still to fail and leave the web platform to the tender mercies of winner-take-all industry politics.

So I'd suggest the Process modernize its terminology, but not in a way that gives the staff too much flexibility to unilaterally cancel in-person meetings without consultation with the AC (or at the very least the AB).

[michaelchampion]

I can only think of benefits to normalizing virtual meetings,

All l can say is that W3C's cohesion and effectiveness seems to have declined over the last decade or so. There used to be two days of AC meetings twice a year, now one is replaced is a 90 minute virtual meeting during the "golden hour" that is minimally acceptable for most of the world but outside business hours in both the US West Coast and and East Asia.

As with most things, it's hard to assess the causality -- is the lack of in-person contact driving decreased cohesion and effectiveness, or is W3C's declining reputation as THE key place for the web community to gather making in-person meetings an expensive anachronism? I hope the AB. / Process CG thinks hard about this before further undermining the in-person meeting culture.

[reidmore-online]

I think a lot can be done to improve remote meetings to achieve some of the perceived benefits of in person. I’m not denying that in person doesn’t have some advantages (currently), but that’s as a consequence to how we design in person meetings, and a consequence of how little we design remote experiences.

In person is great, as long as you can travel internationally, attend meetings with a lot of other people in the room, don’t have caregiving obligations, have financial support, and a load of other factors I won’t list here. In person privileges the few that meet those requirements and is not inclusive to many others.

I don’t like the implication that we need the process as some kind of defense against the team making decisions (that are firmly in their remit) like how to run the AC meeting. It suggests an “us vs them” stance that I find deeply troubling.

[frivoal]

I don’t like the implication that we need the process as some kind of defense against the team making decisions (that are firmly in their remit) like how to run the AC meeting. It suggests an “us vs them” stance that I find deeply troubling.

The Process is a document with contractual value (through being normatively referenced from the membership agreement). Its purpose is to define the responsibility of various participants, Team included. I don't see formally defining responsibilities that form a core part of the value membership as adversarial at all, especially on topics that have been thus defined for many years.

[hober]

I've spun off the idea to completely drop any requirements around AC meetings into issue #1094.

[nigelmegitt]

"face to face" doesn't imply "in person" any more.

To the contrary, I understand "face to face" to be synonymous with "in person" and that's how it is commonly used amongst my peers. I can see how it could be reinterpreted, but that would need clear communications.

It would be better in my opinion to use a different term, like "hybrid", if that's what's intended.

[brentzundel]

Feedback from the AB is to remove the words 'face to face' from the sentence.