The Process of Amending the Regulations

1. Purpose of this page

The ammendment process is regulated by Motion 14.2022.1 of the WCA. The WCA Regulations Committee has the duty of producing and publishing new versions of the Regulations on a periodic basis, based on feedback from WCA Staff and Registered Speedcubers, their own insights, and incidents that happened during WCA Competitions, as per Motion 10.2021.9. It is also a duty of the WRC to deliver interim updates of the Regulations in case of urgent changes or clerical errors.

This page, therefore, aims at documenting and detailing the steps required to fullfil each of the steps described in Motion 14.2019.1. It serves both as a reference for WRC members, present or future, to aid them in the ammendment process, and as a transparency measure, to enable WCA Staff and Community to know more of the processes adopted by the WRC.

Some numbers in the sections bellow refer to the sections in Motion 14.2019.1.

2. Standard Procedure

This section describes the standard procedure of ammending the Regulations. This procedure should be followed unless the ammendment is urgent or a correction of a clerical error. In these cases, the procedure to be followed is the on described in section 3.

In general, the WRC aims to complete the cycle described in this section in the span of one year, starting in January, with the new verson of the Regulations comming into effect in January 1st of the next year.

2.1. Gathering potential changes

2.2. Documenting the potential changes

If you are interested in closely following the work of the WRC, you should start watching the wca-regulations repository by clicking the top right hand icon in the repo homepage.

The current official Regulations and Guidelines are at https://github.com/thewca/wca-regulations/tree/official

Upcoming changes are maintained at https://github.com/thewca/wca-regulations/tree/draft

In general, new changes should be made by two WRC members based on the arguments for/against. This can be either of the following:

A proposal by one team member and approved by another team member.
An external proposal approved by two team members.

(partially copied from the WRC Operations wiki page) Exceptions

Typo fixes and minor cleanup (e.g. clarifications supported by past documentation) can be accepted/directly changed by a single WRC member.
Important new decisions should be agreed upon by a WRC decision vote. For the sake of practicality, it’s acceptable for only two members to merge a proposal into the draft branch as long as the entire team weighs in before the final release process.

2.3. Proposing the ammendment

2.4. Feedback to the ammendment

2.5. Compiling the final set of changes

2.6. Delivering the ammendment to the Board

3. Abbreviated Procedure

4. Decision by the WCA Board

5. Public Announcement

Announce:
- website (e.g. https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/posts/wca-regulations-may-2019)
- staff
- WCT
- organizations@

(partially copied from issue #725)

Software Rollout Process

Update branches
- Update main date, remove textual revision date (e.g. 962213a30fbd1157f61fbf49a319c13245262144)
- Merge draft into official (this should just be a fast-forward if we've been keeping draft up to date with official).
- Create a tag (e.g. official-2019-05-01)
Deploy website: https://github.com/thewca/worldcubeassociation.org/wiki/Merging-and-deploying#how-to-merge-and-deploy-a-pr
- Note: The website automatically pulls the latest Regs from the wca-regulations repo, so there's usually no need to update the main website codebase.