Do or do not; there is no "believe in" or "committed to"

[jyasskin]

https://www.w3.org/TR/w3c-vision/#op-principles includes a lot of "We believe in", "We aim to", and "We are committed to". The Vision should just say we do things, not that we want to do them.

[cwilso]

In general, the Vision was clarifying our rationale for WHY we would do particular things, which I strongly believe is appropriate, particularly in the "We believe in diversity and inclusion.." point. There is also a difference between saying "we are committed to doing this" and "we will do this [maybe just a little bit]". This isn't just saying "we want to do these things", it's "these are the principles we hold dear."

There is one place I might change:

Consensus: We believe in principled, community-wide consensus-building as the basis for building standards.
should really have an action, like
Consensus: We will use principled, community-wide consensus-building as the basis for building standards.

As for the "we aim to" - it is not immediately apparent what action to take to reduce centralization. We went around and around on this; stating it as a principled goal is important.

[cwilso]

Chair+editors think this is resolved now.

[jyasskin]

Here are a couple more specific changes that I think would improve things. Two of these remove "committed to" despite the argument in #217 (comment). I don't think "committed to" makes a stronger principle than saying we'll do a thing, saying we'll do a thing doesn't imply that "a little bit" is acceptable, and our other principles documents (https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/, https://www.w3.org/TR/privacy-principles/, https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/) generally talk about taking actions rather than committing to them.

Interoperability

We verify the fitness of our specifications through open test suites and actual implementation experience, because we believe the purpose of standards is to enable independent interoperable implementations.

Cut "we believe".

Incubation

The Web will continue to expand in user base, global reach, and technical breadth. We are committed to encouraging incubation in new areas, collaborating on innovations across our community.

Could the "We are committed to" change to "We encourage and facilitate incubation" or "We will ..."?

Collaboration

We are committed to establishing and improving collaborative relationships with other Internet and Web standards organizations, and building and maintaining respected relationships with governments and businesses for providing credible advice.

Change to "We collaborate with" or "We build collaborative relationships"?

Diversity

We believe in diversity and inclusion of participants from different [list of axes], and more. In order to ensure W3C serves the needs of the entire Web user base, we also strive to broaden diversity and inclusion for our own participants.

I think removing "also" would improve that.

In trying to find a stronger way to say "we believe in", I noticed that use of "for our own participants" at the end of the paragraph implies that the "participants" in the first sentence aren't W3C participants. But then what are they participating in? Could this paragraph be "[In order to ...] We strive to broaden diversity of and inclusion for our participants from different ..."?

[fantasai]

@jyasskin For the first comment, I think that sentence might need to keep the "We believe", because IIRC there was some amount of debate over the purpose of standardization...

On the last point, maybe replacing the first instance of "participants" with "people" would resolve the conflict?