Add a proposal for the Interop 2024 process

2024/planning-process.md

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+# Proposal for Interop 2024 Process
+
+## Process
+
+### Timeline
+
+1. Call for Proposal Period — three weeks (Sep 14 – Oct 5)
+2. Continued discussion and refinement of proposals — one week (Oct 5 – Oct 12)
+3. Elimination Round 1: Disqualification — one week (Oct 12 – Oct 19)
+4. Elimination Round 2: Reduction — two weeks (Oct 19 – Nov 2)
+5. Elimination Round 3: Prioritization — three weeks (Nov 2 – Nov 30, exc. North America Thanksgiving)
+
+Interop 2024 and the set of accepted proposals will be announced in January 2024.
+
+### Call for Proposal Period
+
+An open call for proposals will begin on a specific date, and run for three weeks.
+
+1. Anyone can submit a proposal.
+2. Proposals should be for either:
+    1. Focus Area, or
+    2. Investigation Project
+3. Related proposals should be filed separately. For example, all the ideas for “Web Compat” should be filed as a set of separate issues, not one issue. This makes it easier to discuss and prioritize each separately. Bundles of proposals risk being rejected or deprioritized.
+4. Focus Area proposals must:
+    1. Name a specific web technology.
+        1. This can be a web technology that has not yet been implemented in any or all browser engines.
+        2. Or this can be a web technology that has already been implemented in all three engines, but those implementations have test failures that reveal a lack of compliance to the web standard, causing a lack of interoperability.
+    2. The feature must be defined in a sufficiently mature standards-track web specification from one the following organizations. Please provide link to the web standard.
+        1. [IETF](https://www.ietf.org/) (Standard Track)
+        2. [Khronos Group](https://www.khronos.org/)
+        3. [TC39](https://tc39.es/) (Stage 2+)
+        4. [W3C](https://www.w3.org/) ([Recommendation Track](https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20230612/#rec-track))
+        5. [WHATWG](https://whatwg.org/)
+    3. Describe the benefit to web developers and the web itself
+    4. Link to existing tests (if any) and/or describe plan to create needed tests
+5. Investigation Project proposals must:
+    1. Outline their scope and their goals,
+    2. Not substantially be work better suited to a group within a standards development organization,
+    3. Clearly provide present or future impact on cross-browser interoperability.
+
+As soon as each proposal is submitted as a GitHub issue, discussion of that proposal can begin. Questions can be asked. The proposal can be edited and refined.
+
+At the end of the three weeks, the deadline will end the period when brand new proposals can be submitted.
+
+A fourth week will allow for continued discussion and refinement of already-submitted proposals. The deadline at the end of the fourth week ends the opportunity to significantly change the scope of proposals.  The proposals will be evaluated on their state at that time.
+
+
+## Focus Area Selection
+
+### Elimination Round 1: Disqualification
+
+After the Call of Proposals Period has ended, the Interop Team will finalize an official list of all Focus Area proposals.
+
+Any Focus Area proposal that does not meet the minimum publicly-stated selection criteria will be considered for preliminary elimination. For example:
+
+1. The proposal is overly vague or broad.
+2. The proposed technology is already interoperable according to WPT results.
+3. The proposed technology is not on a standards track, or its standard is not sufficiently mature.
+
+Decisions will be made at a specific meeting for discussion of preliminary eliminations. The minutes of this meeting are confidential to the team. Any member organization can bring up a proposal they believe should be eliminated. Brief debate can be had. If **there is quick consensus**, that proposal will be eliminated. If there is not consensus and a longer debate is needed, the proposal will be not be eliminated and will instead move on to the next round.
+
+1. Setup *Disqualification meeting*
+2. Each organization can propose items for disqualification.
+3. Brief debate on each proposal:
+    1. if there is quick consensus, disqualify the proposal
+    2. otherwise, send the proposal to Round 2
+4. Publish the list of proposals pushed to Round 2.
+
+### Elimination Round 2: Reduction
+
+At this point, there is a clear list of Focus Area proposals under consideration. Each organization has two weeks to review the list of proposals and make Round 2 decisions.
+
+Each member organization chooses 40 proposals they would like to see move on to Round 3; these selections are confidential to the team. There is no ranking or scoring at this point, a simple “yes, we want this proposal to stay in consideration”. Once all the “yeses” are gathered, any proposal that does not have the support of at least one organization is eliminated.
+
+The goal is to find a balance so all of the proposals that are most likely to be considered high priority will make it into the next round. While eliminating as many as possible, to reduce the workload of the Interop 2024 organizations. There’s no need to extensively evaluate proposals of lower priority.
+
+### Elimination Round 3: Prioritization
+
+The official list of Focus Area proposals is updated to reflect the elimination of proposals not chosen by any organization. Each organization now has 20 days to review the list of remaining proposals and make their Round 3 decisions.
+
+In this round, each organization ranks the proposals in order of importance from most to least. And submits any vetos they may wish to exercise. The entire contents of this round is confidential to the team.
+
+Any proposal that has an objection is immediately eliminated.
+
+Each proposal gets assigned points from each organization, according to their rank, and an ordered list of all remaining proposals is created. Where `X` is number of proposals that are ranked, and `Y` is the ranking a particular proposal gets from a certain organization, then that proposal gets `X-Y+1`  points from that organization. Once all 6 rankings are in for that proposal, the total points from all six organizations is known. If that proposal is not eliminated by a veto, then it has a certain number of points, and can be listed in order among the other proposals.
+
+For example, if there are 20 remaining proposals, each organization will choose a number 1, number 2, down to number 20. Let’s say a proposal for flying cars gets the following ranks: 1, 5, 7, 10, 14, 20. That will give it the following points: 20, 15, 13, 10, 6, 1 = 65 points total.
+
+(If there appear to be quite a few proposals remaining in this round, the group can decide to only ask for each organization to submit their Top `X` number, while rating the rest zero. For example, if 50 proposals remain at this point, it likely makes sense to only submit a Top 25, and to not worry about ranking 26-50 in a specific order.)
+
+After Round 3, every remaining proposal can be listed in order, with the group’s highest priority at the top, and the lowest at the bottom. The team will decide by consensus which of the proposals will be included in Interop 2024 and how they will be grouped into focus areas and investigation efforts.
+
+NOTE: in the past, “Exclude” was a way to express many different kinds of sentiments — including: does not meet the minimum qualifications, or this is low priority to us. We expect “veto” to be used much less than “exclude”, because there are other ways to express those sentiments. Vetoing is specifically for objecting to a particular proposal being included *at all,* no matter how highly ranked other organizations might find it. It’s for expressing objection to a particular web technology, perhaps to something an organization has already expressed an objection to in the web standards process or otherwise has an objection to implementing.
+
+## Interop 2023 Evaluation
+
+During the same period organizations are making Round 3 decisions, the Interop Team should evaluate the status of Interop 2023, and decide which Focus Areas will be retired, and which will be carried over.
+
+\[XXX]
+
+* * *
+
+# Decision point — what to do about Interop 2023?
+
+## There seem to be 3 options:
+
+### 1. Assume carryover.  Retire some.  Add how many ever that leaves space for.
+
+1. Start with the assumption that all Interop 2023 projects will be carried over — except for the ones that are “complete”
+    1. Figure out a process for determining what should be retired.
+        1. Perhaps by voting for each proposal one-by-one, to keep it or not (that’s what we did last year).
+        2. Perhaps by score — everything above 95% Interop gets retired, or something similar.
+    2. Decide how many total Focus Areas we want for Interop 2024. Perhaps 20? 15?
+    3. That determines how many “open slots” we have.
+        1. 26 - the number retired = the number carried over.
+        2. If we are aiming for 20 areas in 2024, and 18 are carried over (retiring 6)... then we have space to add 2 new areas.
+
+### 2. Automatically ‘reapply’ all Focus Areas
+
+1. Carryover nothing.
+2. Take all 26 Focus Areas from Interop 2023, and put them into the selection process.
+
+### 3. Make every Focus Area ‘reapply’
+
+1. Carryover nothing.
+2. Let people propose any focus area they believe is worthwhile still having included.
+
+* * *
+
+# Decision point — Investigation Project Selection
+
+Largely the same as Interop 2023?