See https://www.w3.org/guide/chair/role.html for W3C-wide advice on chairing.
The Process describes how we pick a chair. This may change as a result of w3c/process#891 or other discussions.
Participants in the TAG choose by consensus their Chair or co-Chairs; in the absence of consensus, the Team appoints the Chair or co-Chairs of the TAG. The Chair or co-Chairs must be selected from the participants of the TAG. Chair selection must be run at least at the start of each regular term, as well as when a majority of the participants request it; and may be run at other times when initiated by the current chairs or the Team, for example if a chair steps down or if a minority of the participants make such a request.
While the TAG can decide to use a different chair-picking process in the future, so far we believe the following one is likely to work well:
- Select an outgoing TAG member to coordinate the process for the upcoming TAG. If there are no outgoing members, choose someone who isn't offering to chair for the year.
- Between the election and the start of the term, collect all members' thoughts on what qualities they want in the next year's chairing, and which slates of people they think would be good or bad choices. These thoughts can be expressed privately to the coordinator, who will anonymize and aggregate them before presenting them to the full TAG.
- At the earlier of the start of the term, or the point when the term's TAG appointments are ratified, the coordinator publicizes all the thoughts and proposed slates that they've received, and starts trying to drive the discussion toward consensus on one of the slates.
- If no consensus is achieved by 1 month after the start of the term, ask the Team to appoint.
This is not a full chairing guide, but rather a few points for chairs to keep in mind.
- Chairs should not run discussions about topics they're heavily involved in. If no other TAG chair is available, the chair(s) should delegate to another volunteer to chair the discussion.