RE: [orms] Charter proposal

["Barnhill, William CTR USAF AFMC AFRL/RIGA" <William.Barnhill.ctr@rl.af.mil>]

Hi Nat,
 
While I understand and sympathize that this may create issues, the practice of clarifying a TC's charter while the TC is in its infancy is a standard one. I believe someone (don't remember who) mentioned that every TC they knew of had clarified their charter in their first few meetings. That is also my experience.  
 
Further comments inline:
 
________________________________________
From: n-sakimura@nri.co.jp
Sent: Wed 5/14/2008 10:05 AM
To: orms@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [orms] Charter proposal
Here is my observation on on the activities trying to change the Charter text after a bit of contemplation. 

1.	There has been a period that you could amend the charter. You have not acted during the period. 

[Bill] You are right, but our understanding of what was intended by the charter gelled at the F2F not before, so it seems unlikely that any charter questions would be dealt with before the F2F.

2. By becoming a member of the TC after the period, all the member have agreed to the Charter text and the IPR. This is a binding contract. If the text is changed, you have to go back to your legal department etc. to get an approval again. 

[Bill] I believe that it is contract with the single obligation that IPR that fall in the scope of the charter must be released under the TC's adopted IPR policy.  I don't believe it is a contract that you must refrain from changing the charter. If the TC as a majority feels it is a sufficient enough change to change scope (i.e. one or more of the lawyers consider it sufficient) then we would need to re-charter. If a minority feel it is a scope change then I don't know what happens.

3.	It is not a sound behavior trying to change the contract text just after having singed it. Trying to change the charter text at the outset of the TC is akin to this. 

[Bill] As I mentioned above, the charter is a work in progress even as the TC is in it's early stages. The first version at the first meeting defined the IPR scope, but it can and usually does get clarified to a fair-thee-well.  If it's a scope change is when the lawyers have to get involved again, and again I believe that is up to the TC (with veto powers by OASIS legal if OASIS disagrees? Don't know, somebody should ask Mary on that one).

4.	Therefore, I am against any change to the text of the normative portion of the charter. The charter clarification should be limited to be an acknowledgement of ambiguity in the actual text and the accompanying footnote for the clarification of the actual text/wording. 

[Bill] I certainly understand that position, but am against keeping the word score. We are giving birth to a standard that, like OpenID, has the potential to change the face of the web. Not clarifying the charter at this point is to me like a mother not watching what they eat while they are pregnant: if we do not do it now then we are setting ourselves up for defects in the standard and/or its implementation in the future.

5.	As the result, it is not plausible to change the text scores to something else. We could put a footnote to explain what scores really is, but not changing the normative text itself. 

[Bill] See answer to #4.

I suggest ourselves to limit what we do against the charter to footnotes. Modifying the charter text is not something that we should do now. That is something you had to do in the past. 
[Bill] I thought we had a majority consensus around the reputation values proposal, with you, Tony, and Chris against it. It sounds to me like you are saying there is no way you will change your mind on having score (strongly implying a single value reputation IMHO) rather than reputation value of some other proposal. If that's the case we're deadlocked and we need to decide what to do next.