That’s the approach Dare Obasanjo mulled over yesterday on his weblog. He excerpts a blog post from Anne van Kesteren on the subject, discusses his own experiences with the W3C, and ponders our options:

The question I sometimes ponder is what's the alternative? De-facto standards based on proprietary technologies seem to be one option as evidenced by the success of RSS and IXMLHttpRequest. There is also something to be said about the approach taken by Microformats community. Either approach seems preferable to the current mess we have with the W3C's approach to standards development.

I’ve mentioned some of the web development community’s frustration with W3C working groups in the past, specifically involving WCAG 2. I don’t have enough information on the subject to be able to intelligently state an opinion, but I respect and trust Dare’s knowledge on the subject.