The Improving Web Advertising Business Group supports privacy-preserving advertising and measurement on the web. We host ecoystem-wide participation, including individual users, browsers, publishers, advertisers, and advertising technology providers. The group has been collecting use cases, success criteria, and proposals.
The Business Group is open to anyone, on the payment of an organizational participation fee or W3C Membership.
Group participants have created a number of documents in the web-advertising github repository. At this stage they represent unofficial drafts, produced by one or more indivdiuals, without any indication of group-level consensus.
Just as formal Recommendation-track documents in W3C have a "Status of this document" section near the top, describing who produced them and their maturity level1, I suggest that we do the same for drafts in the Business Group. In many cases, the status will be "Unofficial Draft" -- something an individual or group of individuals has produced for discussion. An Unofficial Draft doesn't need to reflect consensus, and should make clear that it doesn't speak for the group or have W3C endorsement. Individuals and organizations are free to express their support, and it can be useful to others to see that.
For example:
This document is a draft for discussion in the Improving Web Advertising
Business Group. It has no official standing of any kind and does not
represent the support or consensus of any standards organization.
If we want to develop more formal documents, Business Group Drafts or Reports, or to describe "Business Group support" for a document, then we would need to gather group consensus on texts.
The group meets in weekly teleconferences (currently Tuesday at 1500 UTC/11 Eastern). Agendas are shared the day before. Connection information is available to group participants.
To request time on an upcoming agenda, participants should email the list with "Subject: agenda+ [topic]".
We use the mailing list public-web-adv for public communications.
We use irc, irc.w3.org channel #web-adv to take minutes during meetings. Guide to irc at W3C q+ to add yourself to the speaking queue.
Raise questions or suggest new material in issues or pull requests. Open question: who reviews and approves PRs on an existing document?
The mailing list, github repository, and call minutes are public.
The group may host discussions under Chatham House Rule, in which outcomes may be shared without attribution.
World Wide Web Consortium produces voluntary consensus standards: cooperative solutions for open, interoperable platform improvement. The Art of Consensus
Standards work well for:
- Shared technical problem
- Good enough technical solution
- Ecosystem interest in common resolution
W3C provides the forum and process: community and membership develop the specifications.
https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/
https://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/
produce specifications (“Recommendations”) under royalty-free patent policy, Process. Open to W3C Members and Invited Experts
develop use cases and requirements, discuss interop issues, send these to WGs and other groups for specification. Open to W3C Members, IEs, and BG Participants.
community-managed groups. Can manage incubations with Contributor License Agreement. Open to all.
- Specification: WebAppSec WG, Potential new Working Group, e.g. “Private Ads WG”
- Incubation: Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG), Privacy Community Group
- External liaisons: WHATWG, IETF, IAB Tech Lab