OpenActive Community Group Charter

This Charter is work in progress. To submit feedback, please use the github repository where the Charter is being developed.

Goals

This group's mission is to discuss and prepare data and API specifications that facilitate the use of open and shared data relating to physical activities.

The group will base its work on existing standards as much as possible and re-use and extend those standards where necessary. The group will seek consensus around and support for its specifications which may then be brought to an appropriate Working Group to advance a specification from draft to standard.

The group will seek to coordinate as appropriate with the Web Schemas Task Force of the Semantic Web Interest Group and other relevant groups within the W3C.

Scope of Work

In order to support the publication and sharing of physical activity data we intend to:

  1. Specify how to describe activities by agreeing on a basic model for events and their important attributes
  2. Define how to publish data for others to reuse, e.g. via APIs, standard data formats and mark-up embedded in web pages
  3. And, eventually, how to book activities so that people can sign-up to the events they’re interested in

The physical activity sector is very diverse. Data is held in large scale leisure management systems and also shared via individual websites, meetup groups, etc. We need to be working towards supporting the breadth of that community.

The specifications we create will build as far as possible on existing standards and technologies, e.g. Schema.org, etc.

Out of Scope

The community group is not intending to create specifications that relate to the exchange of sports related data. SportsML already defines a standard for publishing scores, lineups, schedules, standards and relevant statistics.

The community group is focussed on specifications that enable the description, sharing and manipulation of opportunity data. That is, data that describes an opportunity to participate in a physical activity, including what it is, where and when it's taking place.

Participation data, such as an audit trail of activities that have occurred, who attended, etc. are all out of scope.

Deliverables

Specifications

The group will work to publish specifications that describe:

Non-Normative Reports

The group will publish additional reports and documents as required, including use cases or other notes that help to document requirements or illustrate best practices.

Currently, it is expected that this will include at least the following:

Test Suites and Other Software

The group MAY produce test suites to support the Specifications. Please see the GitHub LICENSE file for test suite contribution licensing information.

Community and Business Group Process

The group operates under the Community and Business Group Process. Terms in this Charter that conflict with those of the Community and Business Group Process are void.

As with other Community Groups, W3C seeks organizational licensing commitments under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA). When people request to participate without representing their organization's legal interests, W3C will in general approve those requests for this group with the following understanding: W3C will seek and expect an organizational commitment under the CLA starting with the individual's first request to make a contribution to a group Deliverable. The section on Contribution Mechanics describes how W3C expects to monitor these contribution requests.

Work Limited to Charter Scope

The group will not publish Specifications on topics other than those listed under Specifications above. See below for how to modify the charter.

Contribution Mechanics

Substantive Contributions to Specifications can only be made by Community Group Participants who have agreed to the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Specifications created in the Community Group must use the W3C Software and Document License. All other documents produced by the group should use that License where possible.

Community Group participants agree to make all contributions in the GitHub repo the group is using for the particular document. This may be in the form of a pull request (preferred), by raising an issue, or by adding a comment to an existing issue.

All Github repositories containing outputs of this Community Group must contain a copy of the CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE files.

Communications and Transparency

This group will conduct all of its technical work publicly, primarily using the [email protected] mailing list (archives) for high level discussions, and github for technical contributions (See Contribution Mechanics). This is to ensure contributions can be tracked through a software tool.

Teleconferences will be held on a regular basis and advertised via the mailing list to encourage open participation.

Meetings may be restricted to Community Group participants, but a public summary or minutes will be posted to the group's public mailing list.

Decision Process

This group will seek to make decisions where there is consensus. Groups are free to decide how to make decisions (e.g. Participants who have earned Committer status for a history of useful contributions assess consensus, or the Chair assesses consensus, or where consensus isn't clear there is a Call for Consensus [CfC] to allow multi-day online feedback for a proposed course of action). It is expected that participants can earn Committer status through a history of valuable contributions as is common in open source projects. After discussion and due consideration of different opinions, a decision should be publicly recorded (where GitHub is used as the resolution of an Issue).

If substantial disagreement remains (e.g. the group is divided) and the group needs to decide an Issue in order to continue to make progress, the Committers will choose an alternative that had substantial support (with a vote of Committers if necessary). Individuals who disagree with the choice are strongly encouraged to take ownership of their objection by taking ownership of an alternative fork. This is explicitly allowed (and preferred to blocking progress) with a goal of letting implementation experience inform which spec is ultimately chosen by the group to move ahead with.

Any decisions reached at any meeting are tentative and should be recorded in a GitHub Issue for groups that use GitHub and otherwise on the group's public mail list. Any group participant may object to a decision reached at an online or in-person meeting within 7 days of publication of the decision provided that they include clear technical reasons for their objection. The Chairs will facilitate discussion to try to resolve the objection according to the decision process.

It is the Chairs' responsibility to ensure that the decision process is fair, respects the consensus of the CG, and does not unreasonably favour or discriminate against any group participant or their employer.

Chair Selection

The initial chairs for the group will be Leigh Dodds and James Smith of the Open Data Institute.

Participants in this group choose their Chair(s) and can replace their Chair(s) at any time using whatever means they prefer. However, if 5 participants, no two from the same organisation, call for an election, the group must use the following process to replace any current Chair(s) with a new Chair, consulting the Community Development Lead on election operations (e.g., voting infrastructure and using RFC 2777).

  1. Participants announce their candidacies. Participants have 14 days to announce their candidacies, but this period ends as soon as all participants have announced their intentions. If there is only one candidate, that person becomes the Chair. If there are two or more candidates, there is a vote. Otherwise, nothing changes.
  2. Participants vote. Participants have 21 days to vote for a single candidate, but this period ends as soon as all participants have voted. The individual who receives the most votes, no two from the same organisation, is elected chair. In case of a tie, RFC2777 is used to break the tie. An elected Chair may appoint co-Chairs.

Participants dissatisfied with the outcome of an election may ask the Community Development Lead to intervene. The Community Development Lead, after evaluating the election, may take any action including no action.

Amendments to this Charter

The group can decide to work on a proposed amended charter, editing the text using the Decision Process described above. The decision on whether to adopt the amended charter is made by conducting a 30-day vote on the proposed new charter. The new charter, if approved, takes effect on either the proposed date in the charter itself, or 7 days after the result of the election is announced, whichever is later. A new charter must receive 2/3 of the votes cast in the approval vote to pass. The group may make simple corrections to the charter such as deliverable dates by the simpler group decision process rather than this charter amendment process. The group will use the amendment process for any substantive changes to the goals, scope, deliverables, decision process or rules for amending the charter.