Draft minutes of face to face meeting 12-9-05

["John M. Greacen" <john@greacen.net>]

Draft Minutes of the Meeting of the Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee (including conference telephone call)

Friday, December 9, 2005    Las Vegas, Nevada

 

Attending:

John Greacen

Don Bergeron

Robin Gibson

Christoph Hoashi-Erhardt

Rex McElrath

Michael Robinson

Tom Carlson

Tom Clarke

Brian Hickman

James Cusick

Terrie Bousquin

Jeff Barlow

Jim Cabral

 

Report of the Court Document Subcommittee-Rex McElrath and Jim Cabral

 

The subcommittee has held one telephone meeting since its organizational session at the last face to face meeting.  That meeting discussed XSLFO.  The next meeting will be Jan. 17, 2006 at 2pm EST.  The subcommittee has postponed work until January due to the press of ECF 3.0 work and the desire to have ECF 3.0 in final form to serve as a baseline for the subcommittee’s work.  Georgia has hired a new employee with a background in XML to develop Georgia XML documents; he will be available to support the subcommittee’s work.  

 

The subcommittee co-chairs asked whether the TC has guidance for it on the relationship between court documents and ECF 3.0.  The TC instead asked the subcommittee to develop a proposal on that topic and submit it to the TC for approval.  Tom Clarke asked the subcommittee to take into account in its work IEPDs developed by the National Center for State Courts.

 

Rex McElrath asked about the creation of a WIKI to support the subcommittee’s work.  The TC referred him to Jamie Clark of OASIS.  OASIS has begun several tests of an OASIS WIKI approach.

 

Open Legal Standards Initiative

 

James Cusick will represent the technical committee at a meeting in New York on January 31, 2006 called to discuss ongoing standards initiatives in the legal arena and how they can be coordinated.  Don Bergeron will also participate.  It would be beneficial to have Roger Winter’s overview document available for distribution at that meeting.

 

Future work to be done on ECF 3.0

 

To support testing and refining ECF 3.0, the TC identified three tasks and assigned them to TC members:

 

Defining a formal mechanism for the TC to receive feedback from reviewers and implementers – Robin Gibson will work

     with OASIS to develop this mechanism

Configuration management – Don Bergeron will propose appropriate procedures for us to follow

Separately post all schemas and other artifacts – The schemas are all included in one document today.  Jim

     Cabral will work with Robin to separately post them on the OASIS website.

 

The members present discussed the items listed in the ECF 3.0 specification and in the Executive Summary for future addition to the specification and developed the following listing of anticipated future releases and their contents.  The persons identified are responsible for determining the scope of work required to enhance ECF 3.0 to include the listed additional features.

 

We concluded that no further work is needed on a password signature profile or a password and PIN signature profile.  Both of these mechanisms are handled by the Null Signature Profile already adopted by the TC.

 

3.x Support the use of XML to submit all of the content for frequently used standard court forms in areas such as child support and child dependency cases – The work of the documents subcommittee will be incorporated in future releases of ECF 3.x as it is completed.

 

3.0.x or 3.x Incorporate feedback from ECF 3.0 implementations  The TC as a whole will be responsible for reviewing and acting upon suggestions from implementers.

 

3.1 Enhance support for appellate case filings John Greacen and Rex McElrath will determine the scope of additional work needed to ensure that ECF 3.0 supports case filings in intermediate appellate courts and courts of last resort.  Non case related filings in courts of last resort will be addressed by the subcommittee appointed to look into non case related filings.

 

3.1 Enhance filings in additional case categories from the NCSC State Court Guide to Statistical Reporting including lower court appeals, civil traffic, parking, and local ordinance violations  Terrie Bousquin will determine the scope of additional work required.

 

3.2  Develop a means for electronic service of process (the delivery of documents such as summonses, subpoenas, and warrants that establish a court’s jurisdiction over a party)  James Cusick and Brian Hickman will determine the scope of additional work required.

 

3.3  Filings in administrative tribunals John Greacen will attempt to recruit someone from the administrative law field to help the TC determine the scope of work required.  

 

4.0  Consider how the ECF 3.0 specification relates to other filings submitted to elected clerks of court such as deeds, mortgages, liens and other real property instruments and security instruments and liens on personal property  Roger Winters, Jeff Barlowe and David Goodwin are requested to serve as a subcommittee to contact the Property Records Industry Association to determine what support, if any, ECF 3.0 needs to provide in these areas.

 

4.0  Non case related filings such as marriage licenses, wills, notary applications, bond authority, and bond limits in trial courts and bar admissions, bar discipline, rulemaking and other such activities in courts of last resort The same subcommittee is requested to determine how ECF 3.0 can support the filing of documents that are not related to a particular case.

 

4.0  Support future releases of the GJXDM and the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) The TC will rely on Tom Carlson and Robin Gibson, who are members of the XSTF, and Tom Clarke, who participates in the governance of NIEM, to keep the TC apprised of developments.  We anticipate a major GJXDM release within the next six months that will significantly change the way relationships are handled.  We will need to make substantial changes to ECF 3.0 to remain in compliance with GJXDM. 

 

All persons with assignments listed above are asked to report back to the TC on the list prior to the January 10^th TC conference call.  

 

 

Testing of the specification and profiles. 

 

The co-chairs will approach all vendors who participate in the TC and efiling.com and ask them to consider test implementations and interoperability demonstrations of ECF 3.0.  Terrie Bousquin will make a presentation at the Forum for the Advancement of Court Technology for the same purpose. We will seek an opportunity to appear before CITOC to make a similar request.

 

It would be highly advantageous to have an open source reference implementation of the specification in addition to vendor implementations. A reference implementation of a specification becomes the normative example of the specification.  Georgia is possibly interested, but could not begin an implementation for five to six months.  The co-chairs will approach Ron Bowmaster in Nebraska and John Barrett in Phoenix to see if they would be willing to serve in that role. 

 

Refining the Court Filing Blue Requirements Document.

 

The TC will not invest the resources needed to revise the Blue Requirements document.  

 

Tom Clarke, Scott Came and Jim Cabral are participating in a Department of Justice messaging standards strategy group.  They will report back any additional thinking on non-functional requirements that we may want to incorporate in a future ECF 3.0 release.  We will include Tom Clarke’s summary of TC decisions on ECF 3.0 as a supplemental requirements document.  Tom should provide this document to Robin for posting as a TC document. 

 

Face-to-Face meetings for 2006

 

The members present set the following dates and meeting places for face to face meetings in 2006.

 

February 23-24, 2006 in San Francisco in conjunction with the CITOC meeting.  John Greacen will ask Bob Roper for a place on the CITOC agenda for Thursday morning, February 23d.  We will invite the CITOC members to join us on Friday afternoon and have a discussion with them concerning broader participation in the TC by court automation managers and staff. John will ask Christopher Smith to arrange for meeting space at the California AOC.

 

May 13-14, 2006 in San Francisco in conjunction with the OASIS symposium.   John will contact OASIS to let them know we intend to meet at a separate location due to the $30 per head charge imposed by OASIS.  John will ask Christopher Smith to arrange for space at the California AOC.

 

September 21-22, 2006 in New York.  James Cusick will host the meeting.

 

Early December 2006 (specific dates not yet known) in Las Vegas in conjunction with the NCSC e-Courts conference.

 

Additional efforts to communicate with court leaders and vendors

 

Terrie Bousquin will seek an opportunity for a presentation at the NACM annual meeting in July in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  Roger Winters reports that there are no opportunities to make a presentation at ARMA this year.

 

Robin suggested that we may want to develop a brochure on ECF 3.0 to have available at conferences and vendor shows.  We ask Roger Winters to look into that possibility, after he has completed his overview document.

 

John Greacen and Tom Clarke agreed to revise the Executive Summary to submit as an article in eFiling Report.

 

TC resource needs

 

John Greacen asked whether the members want to ask the LegalXML Member Section for additional consultant services for the coming year.  The consensus was that until we have completed the “scoping” exercises for enhancements to ECF 3.0 we have no identified need for consulting services.  The ECFTC has been supported generously by the Member Section over the past year.  We do not have a need for ongoing, unspecified consulting support in 2006.

 

Liaison to OASIS WS Policy and Domain Independent Assertion Language TCs.  These new OASIS TCs may produce additional ideas for dealing with Court Policy.  The TC asks Scott Came and Don Bergeron to review the charters and work of these TCs and report back to the TC on the utility of appointing a liaison to one or both of them.

 

Updating voting membership roll

 

The members present asked the officers to purge the voting membership roll of persons who are no longer eligible for voting status according to the OASIS TC process and to add persons who have recently become active as voting members.

 

Any members requesting changes or additions to these minutes, or to the minutes for Thursday, December 8^th, should notify Robin Gibson within 5 days.

 

 

John M. Greacen

Greacen Associates, LLC

HCR 78 Box 23

Regina, New Mexico 87046

505-289-2164

505-289-2163 (fax)

505-780-1450 (cell)

john@greacen.net