[Minutes] SG Minutes 2020-06-02

[foolip]

Topic: Signing the participation agreement as an individual

@foolip: What are the things we’ve already tried and what haven’t we tried yet?
@travisleithead: If we’re going to make progress we’re going to have to decide something and go with it, can’t keep circling around. The changes to FoWT aren’t going to address this for everyone. We had a suggestion to allow specific individuals to sign as an individual even though their employer is in the FoWT.

@dbaron: We could make an exception for all W3C staff instead of specific individuals.
@foolip: What would be the risk in a setup like that?
@travisleithead: Likely not from universities themselves, have to be patents that got out of their hands?

@othermaciej: If we complete the work on allowing non-normative changes that would take care of some cases. We could also give ourselves permission to make exceptions without hardcoding it to any specific individuals up front. But W3C seems like the only SDO that we need to solve this for.

All summarizing the two options:

• Case-by-case exceptions allowed for people employed by academic institutions (W3C does something similar for invited experts)
• Exception for all W3C staff

@travisleithead: We should move forward to draft what we want and bring that to the lawyers.

Action Item: @travisleithead to draft the first option

[travisleithead]

Update: @travisleithead will start with the second option rather than the first option.