Meeting Reminder: Mediation Mission/Charter 2

Here's your reminder, and the revised Mediation Mission and Charter Statement follows.

I have incorporated much of the suggestions of Sylvia, Ranjeeth and James, with minor adjustments such as keeping Political Analysts and Commentators separate from Domain Experts simply because the domain experts appear to be largely grouped according to academic disciplines, which is a good idea in the sense of formally studying those areas, but while political science could easily belong in that group, I was thinking of Political Analysts and Commentators more in the journalistic context. I decided to simply put Sylvia's suggestion in the short form of the mission statement, and I used most of Ranjeeth's suggestions, with minor adjustments and put the expanded explanatory notes in their own small section.

It is expected that this will probably constitute most of the agenda for this meeting.

Time:Wednesday, 10 March 2004, 12:00pm to 01:00pm Eastern Time
Description:

    Dial in toll free: 877 950 6921
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HUMANML MEDIATION SUBCOMMITTEE
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Mission Statement: For individuals, communities and organizations with a vested interest in mitigating conflict.

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The Mediation Subcommittee of the HumanMarkup Technical Committee is tasked to produce a Human Mediation Markup Language, HMML. To do this, the subcommittee will gather resources, identify and incorporate specific existing vocabularies such as formal legal discourse standards that represent established means for mediation. This will include contributions to the overall Human Markup Language.

Subsequently, this subcommittee will support the ongoing development of significant additions or deletions to the Primary and Secondary Base Human Markup Language modules, and incorporations of or from other standards, to ensure that these specifications can be used interoperably to facilitate the effort of resolving conflicts in various manners.

Beyond incorporating vocabularies in their proper, self-determined, societal contexts, it is considered a requirement to create a standard language for human preferences and interests, cultural and ethnic self-identification, general self-description for temperament and self-description of thresholds for subjective evaluations.

Assisting successful collaboration efforts with other standards organizations, working groups, technical committees, businesses and governmental agencies by using other standards in combination with HMML is an important component of our mission. This may include encouraging sample implementation projects and efforts aimed at improving conditions throughout the human world where mediation efforts can contribute to such improvements or where improvements are necessary to bring about the conditions necessary to allow mediation to serve the purpose of mitigating conflict and/or encouraging cooperation or collaboration.

Scope:
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1) determine requirements for this effort,
2) to organize resources and determine parties interested in mediation standards,
3) establish membership and liaisons between these various parties
4) develop use-cases for HumanML applications applied in mediation scenarios
5) develop extensions to the HumanMarkup Primary and Secondary Base Schemata, and other efforts within the Internet Standards arena, that can be helpful in promoting communications that can facilitate mediation

Interested parties may include the following:
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Government agencies -- inter and intra government
United Nations and other International bodies
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
Corporations -- interested in conflict management within and between organizations
Individuals and Organizations involved in Negotiation, Arbitration, and Deal Making
Political Analysts and Commentators
Domain Specialists; e.g., Anthropologists, Behaviorists, Cognitive Scientists, Linguists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Politcal Scientists, etc.

Values Statement:
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Openness, honesty, and accountability of information transfer.

Objectives Statement:
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We will create a Requirements and Design Principles Document.
We will deliver an initial outline of resources for this subcommittee.
We will establish relationships with appropriate organizations and government agencies.

Further we will establish guidelines for maintaining and extending the HumanMarkup Primary and Secondary Base Schemata and other efforts.

Expanded Explanatory Notes:

It is also our purpose to build vocabularies for use in less formal, but well recognized social contexts that can be legally ratified or notarized or can simply allow parties to air their positions with an improved and improving likelihood of being accurately understood in such contexts as conflicts between neighbors which do not normally result in formal legal suits, but which can, over time, result in escalating those conflicts out of proportion to their root causes such as conflicts over loud noises late at night, or timely removal of trash. This type of vocabulary is also aimed at facilitating the ability to establish relationships between and amongst individuals, communities and organizations with a vested interest in mitigating conflict outside of more formal legal proceedings.

What is meant by self-description of thresholds for subjective evaluations is developing a systematic method for developing empirical data from subjective human emotional states and reactions, perhaps via a standardized table of equivalencies that can be mapped as common datatypes, such as 'tolerance for delay in transaction before cancellation of transaction' or 'that (circumstance, situation, development) made me angry (caused the value of acceptability to equal 0 and unacceptability to equal 1 stimulating the emotion of anger)'.

This establishment of mappable datatypes for thresholds across linguistic and cultural differences is intended to allow for a greater degree of understanding. This understanding is, in turn, aimed at allowing for accommodation in a wider than currently possible range of normal human social processes such as determining thresholds for purchasing decisions for groceries versus purchasing decisions for automobiles, or, for willingness in accepting unfamiliar religious practices in public, to cite a more emotionally loaded threshold.

Membership:
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Rex Brooks: Chair
Other roles: TBD

Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com

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