rethink/rename the term "Collaboration Space"

[ctcpip]

In today's CPC meeting we discussed how the term "Collaboration Space" is somewhat problematic -- awkward, cumbersome, needs to be explained, not necessarily great for our ESL colleagues, etc. Folks agreed that we should either return to the term "working group" or something similar.

This issue is to bikeshed the name we want to use for these groups.

Some options that were brainstormed quickly during the meeting:

• Working Group
• Community Group
• Group
• Team

Many of these terms are overloaded. For example "working group" may evoke people's thoughts of what that means in the context of the Node project or in the context of the W3C, etc. There's no perfect solution to this, but an overloaded term may still be preferable to the current "collaboration space".

[tobie]

Worth noting that collab spaces are also used to host collection of hosted projects which differs white a bit from what’s traditionally understood to be a working group.

[ctcpip]

That's helpful context, thank you. Here's some more historical context. tl;dr: it wasn't simply a shift from working groups -> collaboration spaces. Both collab spaces and working groups existed concurrently before the shift.

[ctcpip]

differs white a bit from what’s traditionally understood to be a working group

Definitely, in some contexts.

There is precedent for this in the OpenSSF, which has Working Groups (WGs), and WGs can host both Projects as well as Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

I think normalizing around the WG term and aligning with the OpenSSF would be a good idea.

[Ethan-Arrowood]

There is precedence for "Community Groups" in standards bodies like W3C (https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/). WinterTC was WinterCG before joining ECMA.

[sheplu]

like the W3C do we want to keep a distinction between WG and CG? if yes we can have - as a suggestion

• Working Group (WG)
• Community Spaces (CS)

[ljharb]

I don't think we need a distinction most of the time - it's really just "groups empowered to act on behalf the foundation" (ie, standards) and "every other group".

[bensternthal]

@kj-powell posted this to slack and gave folks until Friday Feb 6. If there is no feedback we will proceed with Working Groups