The W3C Incubator Activity fosters rapid development, on a time scale of a year or less, of new Web-related concepts. Target concepts include innovative ideas for specifications, guidelines, and applications that are not (or not yet) clear candidates for development and more thorough scrutiny under the current W3C Recommendation Track.
The Incubator Activity allows rapid start of work within an Incubator Group (XG) without review of the W3C Advisory Committee. XGs are based on a simple, flexible process and are designed to create potential elements of the Web's future infrastructure. The number of XGs may be limited until a more clear assessment of the structure, benefits and costs of the Incubator experiment can be made.
Ten XGs — Semantic Sensor Network, Social Web, Open Web Education Alliance, Provenance, Decisions and Decision-Making, Audio, Library Linked Data, HTML Speech , Unified Service Description Language and Object Memory Modeling are underway at this time.
The Incubator Activity was designed to operate with low staff support. Our experience with 10 ongoing XGs and 15 closed XGs indicates that this is possible, albeit some orientation is necessary during the setup and operation of the XGs. We continue focusing on improvements to group tools and documentation in order to help XGs conduct calls and meetings, track issues, edit and publish.
The Incubator Activity has been extended to May 2011. W3C is investigating a new community group replacement for Incubator Groups.
The Team looks forward to receiving XG charter proposals from the W3C Membership. Please see How to Form an XG for more information. Discussions are underway with a number of interested groups. The Team is working on documents and tools to make the creation and operation of XGs easier for the Members who are running them. These resources should also be helpful for other W3C Working and Interest Groups.
This Activity Statement was prepared for TPAC 2010 (Members only) per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Coralier Mercier, Incubator Activity Lead