First meeting of a WG allowed too soon

In section 5.2.6

If known, the date of the first face-to-face meeting. The date of the first face-to-face meeting of a proposed group must not be sooner than eight weeks after the date of the proposal.

This does not leave enough time for review, AC ballot, call for participation, and so on.

This means people must make travel plans before knowing whether or when the charter is accepted, possibly despite objecting to it in case their objection is overruled.

Also, if there are indeed objections and the charter is still under negotiation when that planned meeting occurs, then we're having a meeting of a group whose scope, deliverables, work mode, chairs, etc, aren't agreed upon yet. It's unclear what the group can do in such cases. It's also unclear how we can schedule a meeting without trying to get to some degree of consensus about the time and place among the participants, and before a group is launched, it's not clear who the participants are yet. Of course there's already a core group of people driving the charter who are known, but if they meet among themselves without giving other W3C members a chance to join, that's doing a disservice to the broader Membership, and to the new WG as well by making participation hard.

If we're talking about groups who's charter is being renewed, I think that's probably allowable, as we generally know what's going to happen more or less, and a little bit of uncertainty is probably better than the disruption of cancelling / rescheduling a regular meeting.

But for new groups, it feels like this creates an incentive for "approve the charter NOW, not matter the standing objections, because we're meeting anyway". I think that's bad.

I'd delete this clause, and instead add (probably in 5.2.4) something like:

New working groups must not schedule a face-to-face meeting less than 12 weeks after the call for participation.

8 weeks is the minimum for any f2f meeting (see 3.2), so I'm putting a bit more here, 12 weeks, to give some time after the cfp for new members to join and discuss the meeting.

Read sections 5.2.6 and 5.2.4 of the process document, then compare the existing timing requirement with section 3.2. The work is done when the W3C agrees on the policy for first meetings of new groups and the relevant process text reflects that decision.