Is TPAC open to the public or not?

[frivoal]

• https://www.w3.org/2022/09/TPAC/health.html#on-site states:

  Attendance: The whole event (meeting and social events) will be restricted to TPAC attendees only.

• https://www.w3.org/2022/09/TPAC/participation.html#breakout states:

  We also offer a set of breakouts open to the broader public

• The schedule includes a “Developer Meetup“ on Tuesday from 18:00. I could not find any link from the TPAC website, but eventually found (by googling) that we have a dedicated site for that event: https://www.w3.org/2022/09/meetup/, which states: Participation in the meetup is open to everyone at no cost.

As far as I can tell, parts of TPAC will be open for anybody to attend, and the statement that TPAC will be restricted to TPAC attendees only is not true, except in the tautological sense that TPAC will only be attended by people attending TPAC.

I am not terribly pleased that the assurance that TPAC would be restricted to TPAC attendees only appears not to be factual.

[alexandralacourba]

We will open the breakout sessions to the broader public, yes, but in that case they will join remotely. Here is the communication:
"Breakouts that are requested to be public will be open to anyone to join remotely, free of charge, without a TPAC registration."
I will state this on the participation page for more clarity.

The developer meetup in part of the TPAC meeting and the same health rules will apply to the participants. The link is not on the TPAC page right now, but will be early this week. We are finalizing the website and content.

[alexandralacourba]

Modification made: https://www.w3.org/2022/09/TPAC/participation.html#breakout

[frivoal]

Thanks, the clarification for the breakouts help.

For the developer meetup, it will be open to the broader public for in person participation, right? I don't understand how that is not a contradiction of "The whole event (meeting and social events) will be restricted to TPAC attendees only."

[alexandralacourba]

The dev meetup is part of TPAC, and meetup attendees will register for this TPAC event. "The whole event (meeting and social events) will be restricted to TPAC attendees only." means that only people registered to a TPAC event will be able to attend TPAC (not family members, nor friends nor significant others..").

[frivoal]

I see. While I now understand why the sentence is technically true, that seems confusing and inappropriate to me.

To me, the point of having an event be restricted to participants was that the only people who'd attend are people that we know ahead of time, can communicate to before the event, and with who we will be able to communicate with after the event. They're part of the community, we collectively know each other personally, we can largely depend on trust, and should trust be breached, we can escalate to known people (AC Reps), follow up, etc.

Under that logic, letting a known W3C member come with their child, and occasionally (at lunch, between two rounds of babysitter…) is fine, but letting in an arbitrary person who happens to live in or near Vancouver in is not.

But it looks like our rule is the other way around. Technically, once the arbitrary local person signs up, they are a participant, and the child of the w3c member is not. But from a health protocol point of view, to me it seems to be the opposite of what we should be doing.

[alexandralacourba]

Every attendees coming at TPAC will have to fill in the registration form and will agree to all the health rules and all the actions they should do.
Children, SOs, friends will not register and we have no way to control the health rules aspects for them.
We needed to set up rules and be consistent. We set up rules, we need that every person attending the event respect them. Bringing external people who do not participate actively to the meeting and do not register to attend sessions should not participate in that pandemic context.