Regarding "Membership can include anyone who is a demonstrated stakeholder, and the groups should be between 5-15 people." I have 2 questions:
Does the first half mean that any demonstrated stakeholder would automatically be able to be a member?
Is the second half intended to limit the size, or is it merely a recommendation?
For the first half, that is probably up to each group to define more specifically for themselves, based on their expected scope of activities and meeting schedules. E.g. the support of a quorum of existing members could be required, or it could be self-selection based. We expect that some might be higher-intensity very small groups, and some might be more casual and larger groups.
For the second half, that is intended to limit the size, and was based on the external research (in particular "To allow rapid progress, Working Groups are intended to be small (typically fewer than 15 people) and composed of experts in the area defined by the charter."), plus standard advice about group size (the best short summary I can quickly find is "Thus, the best number of people for one project might be five, while the best size for another group might be 12. As a general rule, groups that have more than 18 to 22 people or less than five become more challenging to manage.")
Thanks Quiddity. That all makes sense. It might help to clarify in the text the degree to which those are permissive, prescriptive, recommendery, etc.
I want to make this edit but I'm not comfortable being the one changing it from "anyone who is a demonstrated stakeholder" to "experts in the area defined by the scope". I *like* the W3C's definition and want that to be the case, with the obvious statement that the SIG can't be overly (beyond some basics regarding anonymized meeting notes or so) private/secret in it's working.
I can appreciate the inclusiveness of the W3C's definition. I respectfully disagree that we should adopt it outright. I don't think expertise is the benchmark for productive involvement. Stakeholder is at once a mildly defensive term to make it clear to all involved what the others interest(s) and perspective is regarding the topic, and a way to communicate an understanding of shared fate. Being knowledgeable/expert alone for me does not pass that test. I'm very hesitant to agree this is the useful measure for issues I have seen interested in this following this model.
My proposal is to keep stakeholder and add a glossary and outlining generally the embodiment of stakeholderhood. This will allow for common metrics across the wildly different technical and social special interests I hope.
The newly added definition for stakeholder alleviates my concerns, I believe. Enough that I'm willing to propose a current group I'm leading to be a SIG. My concern mostly had to do with "where's the line drawn" and "sometimes everyone could argue they are a stakeholder", but this definition strikes the right balance.
A specific group I'm working with strictly controls membership. It sounds like that would not disqualify them from being a SIG (in contrast to my initial interpretation).
However, another group I'm involved with will probably be uber-inclusive, allowing membership by anyone interested (stakeholder or not), and without a specific upper limit. It sounds like they would be disqualified from being a SIG (which feels wrong to me).
Not all organized groups fit the SIG model certainly. This is not a silver bullet. The model that is being proposed attempts to optimize for constructing groups focused on a particular task. The more narrow the scope of that task the better. Group size limits are intended to avoid deadlock and decision avoidance. Groups may be a better org model fit for your second example group.