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TAG/AB and CEO removal integration (Second Draft) #1052

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@frivoal frivoal commented May 14, 2025

  • Removes the CEO's ability to unilaterally remove a member of the AB or TAG.
  • Allows the Team to request the AB or TAG to initiate removal of a member, and reduces the vote threshold in such cases.
  • Allows the CEO + Board of Directors, as a secondary route of action, to remove participants when necessary.

Relates to #882

This approach is an attempt at finding a compromise: at least one AB participant has expressed wanting the CEO's removal power to be replaced by AB/TAG removal, and while another wants to keep both (partly to have a second pathway in case one is blocked). This attempts to find a third way that both could live with. Reluctance in involving the board has been noted as well (1, 2), in response to an earlier draft relying solely on the Board of Directors.


This is split from #1036, to facilitate discussion of the various independent aspects of that PR. See https://github.com/w3c/process/pull/1036/files#r2079248832 and https://github.com/w3c/process/pull/1036/files#r2064388077 for prior discussion on this particular aspect.

This PRs is against the ab-tag-discipline topic branch (source, preview), not the main branch, meaning we can itterate and accept individual pieces, and still have a chance at the end to judge the combined result before we decide whether to merge it.


Preview | Diff

* Removes the CEO's ability to unilaterally remove a member of the AB or TAG.
* Allows the Team to request the AB or TAG to initiate removal of a member,
and reduces the vote threshold in such cases.
* Allows the Board of Directors, as a secondary route of action,
to remove participants when necessary.

Relates to w3c#882
@frivoal frivoal marked this pull request as draft May 14, 2025 08:47
@frivoal frivoal added Needs AB Feedback Advisory Board Input needed Needs TAG feedback Technical Architecture Group Input needed labels May 14, 2025
Comment on lines 1344 to +1346
If at least three quarters of the participants in the group,
excluding the individual who is the subject of such vote,
excluding the individual who is the subject of such vote--
or two thirds, in the case of a [=Team=] request--
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I'm not sure what's behind the different thresholds here, but they're unlikely to be very different numerically for the small group sizes of the elected groups, so I would suggest for simplicity that we pick a single threshold and use it in both cases.

I also wonder if, in the case of a Team request, any Team members of the group should be explicitly excluded from the cohort of voters - and if so, the threshold should be relative to the eligible voters, not the group as a whole.

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@fantasai fantasai May 14, 2025

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3/4 comes out to "all but two" for these bodies. 2/3 comes out to "all but three". The two concerns this tries to balance are:

  • On the one hand, preventing the group from ejecting members inappropriately because of internal disagreements or the like.
  • On the other, making sure Code of Conduct violations are able to be handled even when there are close relationships in the group that might make this difficult. When these are escalated up through the Team, the Team will have made their own evaluation, so there was a request to reduce the threshold in these cases.

The Board of Directors uses a 3/4 majority to eject a member, which I think is an appropriate level and good for us to match. (In the case studies we evaluated when setting that up, the problem was one person who was generally well-understood to be the problem, and these cases were difficult because they had not set up a removal clause in their bylaws and had to do that first.)

@frivoal frivoal added this to the Deferred milestone May 19, 2025
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3 participants