1 WCC Steering Committee Charter
The document defines the Charter of the WCC Steering Committee.
1.1 Purpose
The purpose of the WCC Steering Committee (WCC-SC) is to define and execute the official releases of WCC publications, which include technical standards, technical specifications, procurement guides and white papers.
The Steering Committee also supports and guides the processes of taking technical decisions within various WCC projects.
The WCC-SC will ensure that the WCC’s open standards development process is kept intact and that the WCC community is involved in all important decisions.
The WCC-SC will respect, support and take into account the open standards development process. This, in particular, means that it will support peer-review, maintainership, the practice of “those who do the work decide”, and strengthen the responsibilities and initiatives of the individual contributors.
The WCC-SC will also respect and coordinate with existing decision-making groups and processes where they exist in sub-groups or sub-projects of the WCC.
The WCC-SC will also ensure that specific experts, especially those who work on the topics under decision, are involved in the decision-making process.
2 Responsibilities
2.1 Release Schedule
The WCC-SC is responsible for setting release and update schedules for official WCC documents. This includes release dates, deadlines for individual release steps and restrictions for changes to WCC document versions.
The WCC-SC will coordinate release dates with the marketing and press efforts of the WCC.
2.2 Definition of Release
The WCC-SC defines what standards and specifications are to be defined by the WCC.
It decides which documents are released, along with the role and scope of each document, based on the needs of Wi-Fi WLAN users, owners of Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Fi WLAN professionals and consultants, and Wi-Fi WLAN product manufacturers.
The criteria will be documented and will be made publically available.
The maintainers of each publication have to be involved in the decision-making process.
The WCC-SC decides which translations are included in a release. Other groups concerned with translations have to be involved in the decision.
2.3 Release Management
The WCC-SC will assign one or more release managers for the coordination of WCC publication releases. The release managers coordinate with contributors and decision makers to organise each document release.
2.4 Reviewing publications
The WCC-SC oversees which publications are to be developed and released.
It will also support existing decision-making processes and make sure that decisions are taken in a coordinated and consistent way, in the best interests of the Wi-Fi user community.
If it is not possible to reach consensus on individual decisions, the WCC-SC can specifically decide about the inclusion of new publications and the exclusion of obsolete, redundant or unmaintained publications.
The maintainers of the publications will be involved in the decision-making process.
The WCC-SC is directly responsible for the core WCC publications. For other documents, it will leave the responsibility to document maintainers or specific decision-making groups, where they exist.
The WCC-SC will take care of inter-document issues, balancing interests between documents and will oversee the documents that are released together in the official WCC releases as a whole.
2.5 Inter-Dependencies
The WCC-SC will decide about external and internal dependencies of WCC documents and any external third-party documents and tools.
All decisions will be taken transparently, will involve the WCC community and, in particular, specific experts, and will respect the needs of the various sections of the WCC community.
2.6 Communicating and moderating
The WCC-SC will summarise decision-making processes, help with finding consensus, and will moderate important discussions which affect greater areas of the WCC.
It will act as a technical contact for the WCC in general.
3 Members
The WCC-SC will consist of a minimum of five elected members who will be elected by the WCC Board of Advisors. In addition, any of the voted members can select additional people to become part of the WCC-SC and act in the role of the WCC-SC.
The members of the WCC-SC are elected by the membership of the WCC Board of Advisors by online vote. The general rules for online votes on persons apply.
Members of the WCC-SC are elected for a term of one year.
The WCC Board of Advisors is responsible for the execution of the election.
3.1 Extraordinary Elections
If at least 65% of the members of the WCC Board of Advisors demand an extraordinary election of the members of the WCC-SC, the WCC Board of Advisors will dissolve the membership of the WCC-SC and will hold an election of new members, even if the term of one year has not passed.
4 Transparency
The decision-making process and other activities of the WCC-SC will be transparent to the membership of the WCC and to the community at large.
The WCC-SC will regularly report its activities to the community and will publically document all decisions taken.
The WCC-SC will involve the WCC community in the decision-making process at all times.
Discussions will be held via the WCC Forum, and announcements will be made via the WCC Membership mailing lists.
All policies on which decisions are based will be documented and will be made publicly available.
5 Coordination
The WCC-SC will coordinate with other WCC working groups and with the WCC Board of Advisors on all matters which do not exclusively fall under the responsibility of the WCC-SC.
The WCC-SC will also provide the means to coordinate between groups working on different publications where no sufficient coordination mechanisms exist.
6 Determination
This charter has been determined by the WCC Board of Advisors on 16 March 2015.