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.
Seven XGs — Emotion Markup Language, Emergency Information Interoperability Framework, SWS Testbed, RDB2RDF, Rich Web Application Backplane, Product Modelling, and Common Web Language Evaluation and Installation are underway at this time. Two XGs completed their work. At least one new proposal is known to be on its way.
Because there is minimal Team support for 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 will formally expire in August 2009. XGs started before that time will be permitted to complete their work. The W3C Advisory Board expects to finalize discussions around patent policy options for XGs before August 2009, making the Activity permanent.
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.