Housekeeping and first draft. ACTION ITEMS INSIDE!

[Fabio Vitali <fabio@cs.unibo.it>]

Dear all, 

As announced by Chet Ensign, we now have a wiki for our activities. At the page 

https://wiki.oasis-open.org/legalcitem/techsc

there are the information about the technical subcommittee. At the moment it refers to the minutes and contains the transcript of the chat of the first teleconference of April 2nd, and lists a calendar of the next conferences and our deliverables, and points to a first draft of the first one.

Please find a moment to access the wiki and familiarize with its content, structure and tools, as I seriously hope that this will be the main tool for permanent storage of the decisions reached by the SC. 

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The first delivery of the our subcommittee is "a list of requirements in terms of data formats, syntax and basic conceptual model of the Citations, for the other SCs to consider in their own activities." as specified in our charter. 

I wrote a first draft of this document and put it at 

https://wiki.oasis-open.org/legalcitem/FundamentalRequirements

The purpose of this document is to have a discussion about these requirements, so that the other SCs can be jump started to deliver meaningful and usable outputs for the TC as a whole. 

In fact, I am convinced that while the technical SC will have plenty of topics to discuss about, including protocols, syntaxes, and resolutions processes, there are I am sure a few aspects of our works we all more or less agree upon, that we can share with the other SC very soon without a large discussion, and that will be useful for them. 

I put my understanding of them in a small document that I hope could constitute the basis for the delivery of our first technical document. 

Rules of engagement about this document are as follows: 
1) Open season on typo corrections and stylistic improvements for anybody with no need to report them. The document was written by a person who is not a native English speaker and is used to a language that favors more convoluted and long-worded prose, so please do your best to make it sound more English-like. 
2) Minor content improvements, such as the selection of different words or the reshuffling of the material, as long as it conveys the same meaning as the previous text, are welcome and open to anybody with just the kind request to announce them with a brief message to the mailing list ("I did some small improvements on the text.") 
3) Major improvements, objections, suggestions and/or criticisms should be first sent to the mailing list for shared discussion, and then moved into the text once a first, informal agreement is reached. Please do not send one message with multiple topics, rather limit yourself to one topic per mail and post many messages each with a different subject. Please prefix these subjects with keywords such as "Addition to", "Deletion of" and "Change to" part X of the document, so that it is possible to keep track of the suggestions and criticisms in an orderly manner. 

As I mentioned during the first teleconf, I would rather prefer most of the discussion to take place on the mailing list. Please be ready to write, rather than voice, your opinions and suggestions. Teleconfs are for administration, votes, and the odd nervous breakdown creating lifelong feuds between the involved participants. Therefore, this is my tentative schedule for the first delivery: 

* by April 15th, 23:59 Hawaii Time: all the issues you have identified on this text (including proposals of additions and deletions) are sent to the list, and, as appropriate and wished, a first discussion is already taking place on the mailing list. 
* on April 16th, teleconf: all issues that were closed on the mailing list are briefly examined, discussed and directly transferred onto the draft, while the remaining open issues are listed as well as the diverging opinions on them for the discussion of the following weeks. 
* by April 29th, 23:59 Hawaii Time: consensus about a specific wording for each open issue is reached
* on April 30th, teleconf: the final text is available, read, voted and, if approved, directly sent to the other SCs. 

I hope you agree with me. 

Ciao

Fabio

--

Fabio Vitali                            Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science        Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY               Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
phone:  +39 051 2094872              Man got to tell himself he understand.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it         Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/