CAP profiles planning

[Jamie Clark <jamie.clark@oasis-open.org>]

The EMTC subcommittee on CAP profiles has been discussing plans for
profiles by additional national communities, like the
presently-underway Canadian project, and the US-focused IPAWS profile
recently approved by the full TC.  We understand that our Australian
TC members already are well underway on another profile, as described
on this list.

It's great to hear that there is international interest in a series of
future profiles, though they raise some practical planning issues.  It
sounds like a map of the terrain ahead might be helpful.

Here's how I think this is likely to work. Comments are welcome.
There should be a way to proceed cooperatively and meet both sets of
needs.  OASIS is known for being collaborative and facilitative
rather than grabby -- without abandoning our own purpose, to ensure
that our outputs have the process and policy assurances that we
deliver.   So:

1.  In some nations, there already will have been some pre-existing
work and analysis done on local extensions of the base OASIS standard.
 That's fine.  To permit collaborative work, the local facilitator of
that work will need to make sure that any recommended "delta" of new
material has been donated, with adequate permissions to allow it also
to be re-donated as an OASIS IPR input.   (A TC "Contribution" as
defined in our IPR Policy [a].)  That shouldn't be tough, as any
national pre-work probably will have the same need to obtain its raw
material in an unencumbered form, with no known licensing obstacles to
wide use.

 [a] http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr#contributions

2.  Any member of OASIS can make the contribution, so long as they're
willing to make the assurances about availability.  If a facilitator
Aleph rolls up material donated by locals Beth and Gimel, with their
permission, and Aleph donates that roll-up to the OASIS TC, that's
fine.  Of course we may also talk to Beth and Gimel about being
directly involved at the OASIS level.  But all contributors, direct
and indirect ones, have the benefit of the TC charter scope limits
[b], which limits the breadth of what they're agreeing to.  In other
words, when it's contributed to OASIS, it's on a nonexclusive basis,
so they are only "giving away" their stuff for the limited purpose of
the TC being permitted to bake it into the work products described in
the TC charter, and users being able to implement those outputs. .

 [b] http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process#formation

I have assumed, here, that the international profiles are within the
TC's charter, which seems to be the case to me, but really is my
colleague Chet Ensign's determination to make.

2.  As with the IPAWS profile, the SC can take a draft profile to a
first complete draft, and ask that the full TC approve it as a
Committee Specification Draft.  (That's our name for the first level
of officially approved draft spec on our standards track.)  This can
happen fairly quickly, if the work maturity warrants it.  All the
deliberations are in public, following OASIS style.  The vote date
will be significant later, for IPR Policy reasons as noted in
paragraph 5.

3.  That preliminary "CSD" approval of a plausible complete draft
should be a sufficient milestone for a national review body -- as with
the IPAWS project.  At that stage, the draft has not yet been subject
to an OASIS public review -- which we consider essential to quality
control, and also is a metarequirement from policy authorities like
the WTO.  But the start of the public review freezes further change
(at which point our rules call it a "Public Review Draft").  So that's
a good point at which to re-solicit input from any national
constituencies outside OASIS as well.

   [c]  http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process#publicReview

4.  We suggest that any such drafts be committed to public review and
then, after processing any public comments, approved by the TC as a
Committee Specification. Outside stakeholders will have the planning
benefit of knowing that any proposed changes after the public review
are carefully tracked, and will have the right to submit further
comments from the outside.  "CS" status will invoke IPR availability
(see next paragraph) and should make maintenance of the work much
clearer (paragraph 6).  Those steps (the review and CS approval) will
add 45-75 days to the back-end of the profile timeline.

5.  I do want to mention the invocation triggers of our OASIS IPR
Policy;  it has its full effect only on final TC outputs.  All TC
members have a commitment to provide licensure to support the outputs,
as described by that policy -- which is "timestamped" by the first
Committee Specification Draft approval vote, and will apply only to
the final Committee Specification when approved. [d]   So, to protect
users, we should make sure that each profile is brought in due course
to CS status.

 [d]  Referred to, respectively, as "OASIS Standards Draft
Deliverables" and "OASIS Standards Final Deliverables" in the policy:
http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr#types_obligations

6.  Once a CS has been approved, future improvements ("maintenance")
can be handled in three ways:  OASIS can do it, the national
stakeholders can do it, or the two groups can work cooperatively.

   i.  If OASIS were to house the maintenance, future work would
proceed as before.  Our rules include some special paths for errata
[e] and what's defined as "maintenance activity" [f].

   ii.  Once an OASIS CS has been issued, OASIS does not constrain
what anyone does with it (other than some obvious issues like respect
for reprints and trademarks): but third-party changes take it outside
the protection of our members' licensing commitments.  OASIS can and
does formally submit work to other standards bodies, which is a better
approach, and we have done so with (among others) ISO, ITU, IEC, W3C
and the UN.  Our policies for doing so [g] impose several
requirements: one is a preference international bodies over national
ones, but our senior staff feels that we should be able to get an
exception for obvious reasons for profiles designed for single-country
use.   We also should discuss whether and how our usual requirement of
a interoperability demo can apply to profiles.

   iii.  We have conducted parallel maintenance activities, jointly
with other bodies, on several joint works (including ODF v1.1 and
WebCGM 2.1), so that's also an option here, if both the OASIS TC and
the national stakeholders wish to remain actively involved.

 [e] http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process#errata
 [f]  http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr#introduction
 [g]  http://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/liaison#submitwork

With apologies for a long answer, we'll look forward to discussing the
subcommittee's concerns further, and helping to chart a course for the
 profile work.

Cordially, JBC

~ James Bryce Clark
~ General Counsel, OASIS
~ http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#clark

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