UNCLASSIFIED
Jamie,
Thank you for this explanation of the proposed approach to the Profiles planning process.
I would like to confirm back to you that Australian CAP Users certainly want a CAP Profile delivered for Australia that has been developed under the highest standards of assurance and transparency and which is fully supported
by OASIS. I feel that the proposed process you described in your email offers Australia the level of assurance we seek and I also believe it actually enhances the assurance we are already progressing through the government standards development processes I
am managing in Australia in parallel with this OASIS activity.
Following today's Profiles SC telecon, I have revised the process map that I had previously developed and will be posting the new version onto Kavi as an updated version to the previous document. I request that Scott and
the selected Task 3 Performer review the schedule and activities I have annotated in the revision to the process map and confirm to me whether I have captured all the necessary steps and estimated an appropriate duration for the proposed activities. I'd like
to sort out a workable schedule for this process before the end of this week (US time) so that I can contact my CAP Stakeholders on Monday (AU time) to advise them of the revised CAP(AU)P development schedule and document development intentions.
I can see that we need to ensure our distribution agreement allows for the Australian material to be "donated" to OASIS and allows OASIS to re-donate that material to third parties. I will be sending you a separate email
regarding distribution issues later this week.
Finally, could you please arrange for an appropriate OASIS staff member to respond to the following clarification questions:
1) Do OASIS wish to test the implementation of the Profiles before the final Committee Specification document is produced? This step was not discussed and was not alluded to in your information below. I have included this
issue in the process map at step 11 and highlight that it will impose a dependency upon OASIS being able to complete the production of the Final Committee Specification as I see that there is no point producing that final document when there could be changes
required from the implementation testing that Australia is required to conduct in order to satisfy our development process.
2) After having reviewed the IPAWS Committee Specification I found from the internet, I am keen to find out the following:
a) how OASIS would recommend that the Australian Attorney-General's Department will be able to stamp our Departmental logo on the CAP(AU)P Committee Specification document that OASIS will produce, in order to show a joint
development and approval effort has gone into the development of the CAP(AU) Profile?
b) whether OASIS would object to the final CAP(AU)P product that is approved by the OASIS EM-TC, being attached as a stand alone Supplementary Document to the CAP(AU)P document I am already working on (a snapshot of my version
0.2 was posted onto Kavi yesterday)? I can see from the content of the IPAWS document that much of the value-adding I have done in my document will not need to be used, so rather than waste that rich content that we have already developed, I will be considering
whether Australia should adapt to the fact that a separate document will be produced by OASIS and combine that document into the overarching Australian Government Standard we are producing, which will include the Australian Event Code list as another Supplementary
Document. I did not wish to delegate this information to an Implementation Guide because we have no resourcing or approval to produce something down at the Implementation Level – we will be leaving that responsibility up to the various Users of CAP in Australia.
3) Re: Maintenance issues you raised in #6. – Does “cooperative maintenance” assume that Australia is maintaining active OASIS Membership ? If it does not assume active membership then a cooperative approach is certainly
what we would seek; however, I can foresee the situation where our membership might be forced to lapse if the Australian CAP Stakeholders do not nominate any CAP(AU)P Update activities within a given financial year, so there will be no justifiable business
case to continue funding the 12 month duration membership fee. Our ultimate plan is to survey the Australian CAP Stakeholders every year to determine a CAP work program for future financial years, so I can certainly see the potential risk emerging that the
Stakeholders will not be able to justify continuance of the OASIS membership because it will be difficult for them to predict when they might be seeking updates.
Greg Trott
CAP(AU)P Project Manager
Australian Government Attorney-General's Department
Tel: +61 - 2 - 6141 3904 | Mobile: +61 - 411 278 555
Email: Gregory.Trott@ag.gov.au
-----Original Message-----
From: Jamie Clark [mailto:jamie.clark@oasis-open.org]
Sent: Thursday, 12 May 2011 2:34 AM
To: emergency-cap-profiles@lists.oasis-open.org; elysajones@yahoo.com; sukumar_dwarkanath@sra.com
Cc: Chet Ensign; Scott McGrath
Subject: [emergency-cap-profiles] CAP profiles planning
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.
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. .
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.
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:
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.
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
New OASIS HQ number: +1 781-425-5073
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