Expose information on patent policy under which a WG operates

[dontcallmedom]

In my work towards facilitating transition to Process 2020 in w3c/respec#3086, I'm proposing to add a new configuration option wgPatentPolicy that determines whether a group is operating under Patent Policy 2017 or the newly approved Patent Policy 2020.

Ideally, that information would be determined automatically for specs where the group info is retrieved from the W3C API. It is exposed in the route https://api.w3.org/groups/<id>/charters (when embed is set to true) on the last charter, as a property named "patent-policy".

So it would be great if the respec.org cache could expose that value so that the configuration option in ReSpec be determined automatically.

[sidvishnoi]

Should we assume the Patent Policy to be 2017 by default? Requiring all specs to specify a wgPatentPolicy might be a lot of extra work for maintainers. We can show a warning when it's not set, and assume it to be 2017?

Question: Maybe instead of groups/<id>/charters, we could use /groups/?embed=true and fetch _links["active-charter"] directly?

This change would require some effort on respec.org, as presently we fetch all groups in one go, instead of sending individual request for all groups when needed. I will try to do it over the weekend.

[dontcallmedom]

There is a timing aspect: soon enough Patent Policy 2020 should be the default - the expectation is that all groups will have switched to it by early 2021. But between September 15 and early January 2021, most groups will probably be still 2017.

Exposing the data on the respec.org endpoint is precisely to avoid having every WG set this - if they already use the "group" shortcut, they would get it for free; and if they don't, it would be best to encourage them to use this rather than set this property which will have to be updated shortly thereafter.

I think using the active-charter link makes better sense, indeed.