Minutes Draft from the OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee Secretary

["Dr. Laurence Leff" <D-Leff@wiu.edu>]

                     Minutes Teleconference of March 12th
     Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
                                    (OASIS)
                           Legal XML Member Section
                       E-Contracts Technical Committee (TC)

Present

Dan Greenwood
Jason Harrop
Jim Keane
Laurence L. Leff, Ph.D.
Sergio Maldonado
Dave Marvits
John McClure
Zong Milosovic

4:06 Eastern Time

After Mr. Milosovic gave a brief introduction to his work, the coChair, 
Mr. Greenwood called the meeting to order at 16:06 Eastern Time.  Due to a 
scheduling conflict for one of the members, we will be meeting at 16:00 
Eastern Time on every other Wednesday.  Thus, our meetings will now be on
   March 26th 16:00 Eastern, 21:00 GMT
   April 9th  16:00 Eastern, 21:00 GMT
   April 23rd 16:00 Eastern, 21:00 GMT
   May 7th    ?     Eastern, ? GMT
Since some of the members in Australia will be waking up early in their
time zone to accomodate this schedule change, their scheduling preferences
will "trump" should we need to deviate from our 17:00 Eastern 22:00 GMT
time zone after May for another reason.

Dr. Laurence Leff reviewed the OASIS attendance policy during the meeting.
This policy is outlined on the OASIS web site; Dr. Leff will forward a link
to this policy to our Technical Committee's Mailing List.  This policy includes
sending "warning letters" to those members who miss two out of three of
our meetings.  This responsibility was delegated from the CoChair to the
TC Secretary.  Also, the TC briefly discussed the impact of the new
software, manufactured by a firm called KAVI, that OASIS will be using.  
It helps the Technical Committees manage a variety of their activities including
their web space and membership.  Mr. Greenwood, as chairperson, will enable
Dr. Laurence Leff's permissions to "Secretary" so that he can update
our materials.

Jason Harrop then lead the discussion of our requirements analysis, use cases,
and "scenarios."  The first question was whether the eight scenarios posted
a complete representation of what we wish to enable with our standards effort.
It appears that they are.  One member brought up the interface between contracts
and the needs of financial accounting.  It was decided that this topic was
not covered explicitly but may be managed by the "Enterprise Contracting
Architecture" scenario.

There were two models, on which work will proceed in parallel.  The first
was a "Clause Model" which defines the "pargraphs on the page."  This is 
a container for the "legal content."  An important decision for the Technical 
Committe is whether this should be a hierarchical model or a recursive model.  
Hopefully this issue can be resolved in one month (at our April 9th meeting).

The other part was the "obligation model" or "legal content."  These two
models could also be referred to as "form" vs. "content" respectively.

The TC's membership should work with several scenarios to help the author
identify the information that should be captured in markup for the context
represented by the scenario.  Some participants pointed out that our 
member's time might be conserved if each TC were reviewed by only one person, 
but at the end our TC decided to have several members look at several scenarios.

At our March 26th meeting, the Technical Committee plans to set a timeline
for this process including assigning people to specific tasks.  The long-term
goal is to produce a consolidated document that will identify which information
is needed in which scenario and to identify differences.

The Technical Committee also discussed bringing in outside expertise.  This
includes those with the knowledge of contracting practices and laws in various
jurisdictions.  It was the consensus that there was enough expertise within
our group to do the first effort.  At that point, other groups, including
the Computer and Law Society in various countries, would naturally be quite
willing to work with us to bring their expertise to bear to give constructive
criticism and knowledge.

Dan Greenwood, co-chair, closed the meeting at 18:53 Eastern time, pointing 
out that he showed the scenarios to several outsiders.  They were impressed 
with the scope and clarity of our work.