Documentation for Task forces & their leads

Johannes recently opened a PR on swicg/meetings for meeting best practices, and this spawned the question: given the W3C provides no guidance below the CG level, and we have task forces (a dozen of them?) operating within Social Web CG, it probably makes sense to formalize the process, the expectations of leads, how we pick leads for task forces.

A few ideas I had there were:

• Task force leads have the role of facilitator, not decision maker; That is, their role is to seek input and help the task force work towards writing a specification, report, or explainer document. If the task force lead wants to comment on something with their own opinion, they should make that clear that it's their opinion and not a decision.
• Decisions come about from group consensus, based on input from experts and participants.
• Task force leads should probably not be coordinating payments for anyone implementing proposed standards in their software implementations, since this creates a perverse incentive to agree with the task force lead rather than discuss and decide together as a group.
• Task forces may secure grants for the work involved in writing their document output or participating substantially, as well as members applying for grants or being funded to work on task forces.

See also:

• https://sphericalcowconsulting.com/2026/05/26/when-consensus-fails/
• https://sphericalcowconsulting.com/2025/08/19/working-group-chair-skills/
• https://writings.thisismissem.social/how-standards-are-made/