Member Submissions are used a few times per year (7 times since 2015, so the membership finds some value in them. But the section that defines them is quite long at complicated. Clocking it at a little over four A4 pages in a pdf rendering, it might not need quite that much complexity. For comparison, this is a little longer than the sum of the sections covering charters (including what goes in there, AC reviews of charters, the process for re-chartering, group closures, charter extensions…), even though it's not nearly as important.

Although some editorial massaging may be possible, I suspect that to significantly simplify and shrink that section, we need to actually change how Member Submissions work. To do that well, I think we need to think about what they're trying to accomplish.

The way I understand them, they allow a Member (or a group of Members) to submit material to the W3C community:

• to be hosted on the W3C website, with the usual archival and availability guarantees, for ease of reference
• with clarity about whether patent commitments will be offered should that proposal make its way to the REC track
• without obtaining the consensus of a WG prior to submitting it
• possibly even before a related WG even exists

Along the way, it gets assessed by the Team / Director, who may reject it "for a variety of reasons", only some of which are listed. I believe that later part is much less useful, as it is arbitrary and ill defined, and having the Director as gate keeper of good for / harmful to the Web feels quite out of place nowadays. If we need any review at all, having the TAG or/and HR groups provide it would seem more relevant, and maybe it could be provided after publication of the submission, rather than blocking it.

I think that if we redesign the whole thing based on the simplified goals above, maybe with some optional TAG/HR review, we could achieve something which would at the same time be much simpler/shorter in the Process, simpler in practice, and more in line with modern practices.