Selecting members of the AC / TSC / Working Groups

AIUI, the current proposal for the governance model pre-seeds membership of the AC and TSC, and thereafter they become self-selecting. Members are perpetual (unless kicked off by a simple majority vote), and there is no obligation for them to take on people who they don't want to.

This is a not-uncommon model for Open Source; if you don't like what the "insiders" are doing, you fork, and that becomes a constraint on the insiders (assuming that they want to avoid forks where possible).

I question whether this model is suitable for AMP, if the goal of the project is to eventually produce things that become (or feed into) open standards.

Google and those aligned with their interests will choose the initial set of members, and there is very little incentive (and no requirement) for them to broaden membership beyond that. The output will be acceptable to these parties, but could be very unacceptable to the broader community.

Unlike in open source, forking is not a good way to address that tension; it creates fragmentation, rather than a standard that reflects the _entire_ community.

Looking at it another way -- the elephant in the room WRT AMP is the power dynamics between Google as an aggregator of content and other publishers of content. Creating a self-selecting governance model does nothing to address that.

So, if the purpose of the project is to create both software and specifications that eventually become standards, I would suggest a governance model that embodies more of that tension, so that the result is more representative of the overall community.

I.e. -- either embrace your critics by giving them significant and representative power, or seriously limit the scope of the project to manage people's expectations for it.