[jyasskin]

Current charters only marginally address this requirement by including a fractional FTE commitment (e.g. "0.25 FTE"). They don't describe an expected level of involvement at all.

I see three possible reasons to put this information in charters:

1. To give the AC some control over the W3C's budgeting.
2. To give the AC some visibility into the W3C's budgeting.
3. To help the AC determine whether a WG is viable: if some work needs to be done, and no members are willing to contribute time to do it, and the W3C isn't willing to staff it, the WG shouldn't be chartered.

None of these seem compelling:

1. It's impractical to try to direct a budget by making suggestions on ~50 individual charters. The AC also shouldn't be micro-managing the W3C's staff allocation at this level, and staffing shouldn't be fixed 2 years at a time.
2. It's impractical to identify prioritization by reading ~50 individual charters. https://www.w3.org/Member/team-effort is slightly better for this, but https://github.com/w3c/board/issues/308 explains why it's not good either.
3. This seems like the best reason. However
   1. It would require that the level of involvement be described, not just the time commitment. That's not being done, so AC members must not be actively using charters for this purpose right now.
   2. We don't record which work is critical, and which members have volunteered to do it, so there's no way for most AC members to tell if any critical work is being left out, and so no way to use the Staff commitment to figure out if the group is viable.

So I believe this change aligns the Process better with both existing practice and the way we ought to charter groups. It doesn't, in itself, require any changes to the charters we're actually writing, although I'll be suggesting, separately, that we also remove the fractional FTE commitments in the template.

Fixes #1195.

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Preview | Diff

[chrisn]

I think the real reason to include this information in charters is to give the WG a sense of how much staff time to expect. Removing that from the charter template would be net loss IMO. Budgeting and prioritisation is a separate thing.

[jyasskin]

@chrisn If members or chairs of groups need to know how much demand they can put on their team contact, that seems like a better fit for pages like https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/webapps/ that are shorter and more focused and can flex as the W3C changes staff allocations and prioritization.

[nigelmegitt]

I would not remove this text (i.e. merge this PR) except as part of a bigger piece of work to consider what WG and AC members need in terms of team effort visibility.

If there are other connected changes, please link to them in the PR or in the linked issue.