Make Forum Subcommittees Less Formal

[BenWilson-Mozilla]

Currently, section 5.6 of the Bylaws says, "Forum Subcommittees must post all agendas and minutes on a public mail list." However, based on practical experience, Forum Subcommittees operate with less formality and should not be required to produce or publicly share paperwork that imposes unnecessary administrative burdens. An alternative to the sentence above might be, "Forum Subcommittees must provide any agendas or minutes to Forum Members." That way, they would not be required to create agendas or minutes, and any created could be saved to the Forum's wiki instead of being made public. This approach is consistent with the Forum's historic treatment of sensitive matters using the Management List.

[BenWilson-Mozilla]

The proposed change would only apply to Forum-level subcommittees (not the Validation Subcommittee of the Server Certificate WG), and the minutes and activities of WGs would be totally unaffected by this change. The only two groups that this change would presently affect are the Forum Infrastructure Subcommittee and the Forum IPR Subcommittee.

Forum-level Subcommittees cannot create any guidelines in any event without an appropriate Forum ballot. ("A Forum Subcommittee will not generate or discuss any Contributions, Draft Guidelines, Final Guidelines, or Final Maintenance Guidelines (as such terms are defined by the IPR Policy)".

Also, the Forum-level subcommittees would still need to prepare agendas and minutes, they just wouldn't have to be posted to the public list. They could be distributed among group members and made easily available to all Forum participants. They could be stored in the wiki.

An additional reason for this proposal is that sensitive topics are sometimes discussed and participants don't want the information to be widely disseminated and crawled by search engines. Chatham House rules might also apply to discussions of these groups.

In Bylaw 5.6,
Change: “Forum Subcommittees must post all agendas and minutes on a public mail list.”
To “Forum Subcommittees must provide all agendas and minutes to Forum Members.”