Introduction from Karl Best

["Karl Best" <kfbest@earthlink.net>]

OASIS Members:

As you've seen in the press release that went out earlier today, I have
recently been hired as Director of Technical Operations at OASIS. My two
main duties are managing the standards efforts taking place at OASIS, and
managing the infrastructure (computer servers, web pages, mail lists, etc.)
we use to keep those standards efforts running. I report directly to the
OASIS board, and take direction on standards work from the OASIS Chief
Technology Officer, who is currently Norbert Mikula of DataChannel.

OASIS sponsors a number of technical committees for topics such as XML and
XSL conformance, DocBook DTD maintenance, the XML.org registry/repository,
etc., and co-sponsors the ebXML effort with the United Nations CEFACT
committee. Each of these committees are provided by OASIS with mailing lists
and web pages, as well as management of the balloting process for approving
standards created by the committee. This infrastructure is my
responsibility.

A new OASIS advisory committe headed by Jon Bosak, the Process Advisory
Committee (PAC), is working to define new consortium bylaws that will
specify how technical committes are formed, operate, and disbanded, and how
committee recommendations are voted upon and turned into OASIS
specifications. The implementation of this new process in the technical
committees will be my responsibility.

For those of you who may not know me, I have been involved in the XML/SGML
world for quite some time. I've been active in OASIS activities starting
with SGML Open, OASIS' predecessor, since its founding in the early 1990's,
and served on the OASIS board of directors as Chief Strategy Officer from
1997 to 1998. I've been a regular attendee and speaker at XML/SGML
conferences for many years, and have been a member of a number of standards
committees related to XML/SGML including the W3C XML working group, ANSI and
ISO committees for the revision of the ISO 8879 spec, Davenport, and ebXML.
I have worked at Novell, Adobe, Sun, and most recently Enigma.

I'm extremely happy to be working with OASIS on a full-time basis after
being involved with the consortium for so many years. The OASIS mission is
something I'm very dedicated to, and the people involved are a great bunch
to work with. I'm looking forward to meeting our new consortium members, and
speaking with anyone who may have questions or concerns about standards
activity processes and infrastructure at OASIS.

</karl>
============================================================
Karl F. Best
OASIS
Director, Technical Operations
978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org
http://www.oasis-open.org