I think we’re going to have to carefully evaluate who are audience is and where they hang out. The process following seems well designed for official documents relating to and speaking to OASIS members, or for wider public distribution of documents officially representing the OASIS standards charter.
In terms of informal adoption documents, helping people get up to speed, as opposed to defining standards, I wonder if a public venue like dita.xml.org would be better, where anyone can join and contribute without a protracted review phase. I am very concerned that a protracted, complicated review phase with multiple votes and sign-offs is likely to curtail enthusiasm for writing helpful articles on a regular basis that are difficult enough to garner given our limited time and day jobs.
We could have a quicker, internal review as a “workgroup” within the Adoption TC, posting to dita.org. These would not be official standards documents representing the TC. Individual authorship could be noted.
We might have a triage for those documents that are official, which follow the TC process outlined following, and those that are not official, which are posted outside the auspices of the TC.
The downside I can see for unofficial documents is that they lose the “branding” of the Adoption TC, which I think is unfortunate, given that disseminating adoption information is the primary purpose of the TC (as opposed to coming up with standards). I do not know how to rectify branding, but perhaps this problem is better than curtailing article production.
Troy
From: Kristen Eberlein [mailto:keberlein@sdl.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:25 PM
To: DITA Adoption TC
Subject: [dita-adoption] Summary of new OASIS process
Key links:
Here is a summary of how the new OASIS processes will affect our feature articles
o We approve the work product as a “Committee note draft.” This requires a full majority vote of the TC.
o We decide to submit a committee note draft for public review; this also requires a full majority vote of the TC. If approved by the TC, this draft becomes a “Committee Note Public Review Draft”; it must be accompanied by a “recommendation from the TC of external stakeholders who should be notified of the review.”
§ Link to the minutes for the Adoption TC meeting at which the TC approved the committee note draft and voted to request a review
o Mary McRae announces the public review to the OASIS membership list and “optionally on other public mail lists.”
o Non-TC Members post comments to the TC's public-comment list. [Do we have such as list?] We must acknowledge the receipt of each comment and track the comments received; at the end of the review period, we need to post a list of how each comment has been handled to our e-mail list.
o If we make ANY changes to the committee note draft as a result of the public review, we need to start the whole process over. The review period this time is only 15 days.
o After a public review that does not generates any comments that result in the changes to the committee note draft, we can approve the work product as a committee note. This requires aspecial majority vote of the TC. If the 15-day review generated any comments, this vote cannot be held before seven days have passed since the close of the public review. To conduct the special majority vote, we need to notify Mary McRae that the TC is ready to vote and provide her with the location of the editable versions of the files. She sets up and conducts the ballot.
Best regards,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein l DITA Architect and Technical Specialist l SDL Structured Content Technologies Division l (t) + 1 (919) 682-2290 l keberlein@sdl.com Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail