Seeing the open issues
Ian Hickson announced on the WHATWG and public-html mailing lists that he's written a tool that exposes his list of open issues:
In response to the concerns over the lack of transparency that have recently been expressed both in these mailing lists and on blog posts, I have written a tool that exposes the issues I have on my list:
You can even vote for an issue to indicate that it should be made a priority (to do that, you'll have to have sent an e-mail that ended up on that list, as I use that as a way to prevent random spammers from trying to use this web app).
There's also a page that shows the current 20 most-voted-for issues:
http://www.whatwg.org/issues/top
That page also contains some notes on what I'm likely to work on next, though this information isn't necessarily accurate.
In addition to the above, you can also get a notification of every change to the spec using one of the following methods:
You can follow this twitter feed (you can even subscribe to this with your mobile phone so that you get text messages for every checkin):
You can subscribe to this mailing list:
http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/commit-watchers-whatwg.org
You can browse recent changes to the spec here:
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker
If anyone wants to volunteer to summarise changes and post announcements, please just do it! Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness! I'm not sure what the process is to post to the HTML working group blog, but you can post to the WHATWG blog just by signing up and writing a blog post (just tell Lachlan afterwards so he can actually post it, we have that limited to certain users because spammers were abusing the blog). You can also post announcements to the WHATWG twitter feed using the form on the front page of whatwg.org.
Cheers,