Agenda development for SF face to face

["Peter Meyer" <pmeyer@elkera.com.au>]

In anticipation of the next phone conference, I set out a possible approach
for our face to face meeting on 19 & 20 September.


LAST CALL FOR USE CASES

Use cases are due by 1 September.

So far we have only two use case documents which are essentially the same.
It would be helpful if we could have at least or two more to expand the
issues a little. Possible use cases might include:

* business to consumer web transaction contracts

* business to business automated contract negotiation.

The idea of the use cases is to identify specific classes of contract
related transactions and the key interest groups, problems and anticipated
use of XML and a standard in resolving those problems.


POSSIBLE FACE TO FACE PROCESS

  DAY 1

1. Authors and other interested parties to briefly outline each use case.


2. Demonstrate vendor applications.
During the last conference call we discussed the possibility that some of us
who have developed applications could demonstrate these to help everyone
understand some of the issues, particularly in the use of structural markup
and the way authors might create contract documents using XML markup. I
believe Jason might demonstrate parts of the SpeedLegal application. I can
demonstrate contract document authoring using a general purpose XML editor
and Elkera's contract & document schema that, while different to our XHTML 2
proposal, will help people to visualise many of the issues we have
discussed.

PM comment: While this may be useful to enable us all to better understand
some of the issues that have arisen over the past year or more, I am not
sure if this is absolutely necessary for our high level requirements
analysis. It is possible we should schedule these demonstrations at the end
of the day, if we have time. At the very least, we should keep this fairly
short. What do others think?


3. Identify transaction classes from use cases and establish those that
should be the focus of a standard.


4. Identify the high level needs of the interested persons for XML markup
and a standard in connection with the use case.


5. Develop a short (few lines only) vision statement for the selected
transaction types. This should be the headline marketing statement we could
present to promote our first draft standard. It might be in a  form along
these lines:

Until now, [interested persons] involved in [contract document related
activity] have suffered from [key problems]. The eContracts standard will
enable [interested persons] to avoid these problems. It will:

* [benefit 1]

* [benefit 2] etc.

The process of developing this short vision statement will set us on the
path to developing our high level requirements.



  DAY 2 (possibly, we may not finish point 5 on day 1)

6. Develop statement of high level requirements for each transaction class.
By high level, I mean broad statements that would preclude any reference to
specific elements in XML markup.


7. Identify common requirements among the use cases and work all high level
requirements into a coherent structure that eliminates duplication and
places each requirement in its transaction context. This should provide most
of the outline of our requirements document.


8. Establish priorities for development of more specific requirements.


I think this will take us all of our 2 days. If we can achieve these modest
outcomes we will be well placed to move forward quite swiftly to finalise
our requirements. At the very least, I think we must finish point 6. If we
don't do that, it will be hard to move forward quickly after the face to
face.

This is just a suggestion. Please let me have comments.

regards
Peter Meyer