The two are very different.

Having meetings where not everyone can participate but where decisions are made (e.g. face to face meetings, teleconferences) is “closed”, and doesn’t allow for open participation.

Having a committee decide on editing means that no one person is fully responsible for the spec, and that automatically means that you get a lower quality spec. People do better work when they are going to carry the full blame if the result is bad. Committee-driven design is well-known for being a bad way of designing languages (and indeed, almost anything else).

What CSS needs, and what the WHATWG group has, but what you don’t seem to have realised is the key to the success of the WHATWG, is the combination of _anyone_ being able to send and discuss feedback, and one person, asynchronously taking _all_ feedback into account and attempting to come up with the best solution to satisfy everyone’s feedback.

In the CSS group what we mostly see is feedback being dismissed instead of considered, language decisions being made in a committee instead of with the overall vision and consistency that a single editor provides, and the opinions of some working group members being given disproportional weight instead of all opinions being taken at face value.

Being transparent will make this more obvious, and thus should help push the group into the right direction, but it is not, in and of itself, the real solution to the specification quality problem CSS has.