Managing changes to proposed charters when GitHub is used #9
Description
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:
- 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.
- Modify the original charter in place with the following status sentence at the top: "This charter has been superseded as a result of Advisory Committee Review; please see the [revised charter]".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in place to link to the history of changes with the following status sentence at the top: "This charter may have been superseded as a result of Advisory Committee Review or other feedback, please check the [commit history] for details"