Re: [tm-pubsubj] teleconferences, Committee Plans, etc.

[Mary Nishikawa <nisikawa@fuchinobe.oilfield.slb.com>]

>* Mary Nishikawa
>|
>| I could handle heading Geolang if it were a subcommittee as opposed
>| to a full-blown committee.

*Lars Marius Garshol
>Mary, how do you think this would make it possible for you to handle?
>I don't think it would be any less work...

*Mary
If you look at the activity of GeoLang from the website, that would be 
true. There are no minutes for 2003 and the files that we have there are 
the ones I uploaded in April and these were mostly of work done last year. 
There is not much  list activity either. The main, but yet important 
activity is your updates to the PSI sets, but this is not really discussed 
or reported on. We had a meeting in London, but what happened to the 
minutes? No, this is not much work :)

Now, if you take a look at XMLvoc, it looks the same. No minutes for 2003, 
Holger recommended Patrick to take over chairing  the committee in the mail 
list, and even that was not changed on the site. We still need to 
officially elect a chair for XMLvoc, or maybe we did it in London, but 
there are not minutes, well... we did have some discussion on the mail list 
after the meeting about definitions, but after that...

If we were running monthly meetings with agendas and minutes, the 
differences would be visible, but we are now running OASIS meetings similar 
to how we do ISO meetings -- Collect feedback between the 3 yearly meetings 
over email, and submit documents to the committee before we meet F2F. The 
chair is pretty much operating as a standards editor in ISO.  This is not 
exactly the way OASIS committees should operate, I think,  but this is how 
our committee evolved out of habit maybe. For these committees, I think it 
is OK though. But we need to have more communication, have minutes and at 
least we should keep the sites up to date.

A committee chair as opposed to a leader of a subcommittee is quite 
different and the chair for published subjects had more work to do than 
GeoLang or XMLvoc. The committee chair is planning all of the agendas, 
meetings, administrative stuff, and the subcommittee leader would provide 
feedback to the chair if we were to run active committees that is.

So these committees in effect are really being run as subcommittees now.

We can continue in this mode, but it will not work for the Published 
Subjects committee.
There are also no minutes for Published subjects after February 6, 2003. No 
London minutes either and no meetings after May, IRC or otherwise.

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/meetings/index.htm

We had the most activity in 2002. Once we stopped the conference calls, the 
activity seems to slack off, but there may be other reasons too.

>*Mary
>| It would be good to have an OWL PSI Subcommittee, for example

*Lars Marius Garshol
>That's not a bad idea, but we could do a separate TC, too.

I really would not like to start a separate TC for this.

>  Or we could
>do a new umbrella TC, but I think we want to finish up the three pieces
>of work we are currently embarked on before taking up new ones.

Agreed. This seems to sway me to keep the GeoLang and XMLVoc as they are 
for now, but with more visible activity. I still think that we need to work 
on how Published Subjects is going to be run, and it should *not* be run as 
these two committees are now.

>Mary, Patrick and I argued against concalls, but you seem to have
>ignored that. Could you explain why you prefer concalls?

In my experience, I have not gotten anything done completely  with a 
committee without some verbal contact. As you can imagine, I should be the 
one least wanting conference calls since I already have too many 
work-related ones already. If you look at our committee record, it seems to 
more us forward. We need a meeting soon, but we need a complete 
agenda  beforehand. We can do this on IRC, but these are not *official* 
OASIS meetings. We need to check on this or request changing this.  I will 
not be at the F2F so a call once in a while would be necessary to maintain 
membership status, and also for others not attending the F2F.  For you, it 
is not necessary because you will attend the F2F meetings.

The best of both worlds would be the have a conference call at the time of 
the F2F, and in that case you would not be on the line :) however, this is 
very expensive to do from the hotel conference room. Any suggestions or 
volunteers for sponsorship would be appreciated.

>  | We need to have more detailed agendas and ToDo lists, I agree with
>| Patrick there. Then people can sign up for tasks.
>
>We are all in agreement on this, it seems, which is good.

Another option is to leave the official charter as is, but have a document 
which outlines the deliverables we have agreed on with new dates and a 
meeting schedule with projected milestones. Since I cannot guarantee being 
at the F2F meetings, I did not nominate myself for chair. I propose  to 
co-chair with Patrick and let him handle the F2F meetings, etc. and I would 
handle the other meetings/agendas, minutes. Then I think we can move forward.

I still in principle, agree with Steve's points and would really rather 
have a new charter, etc. I still think that we can request to change the 
name of the committee without too much effort. I recall this being done for 
one of the web services committees. We can explain that we are 
changing  the name be cause we need to emphasize that the published 
subjects we are creating are not exclusive to topic maps. I will check with 
Scott McGrath. This will give us some more exposure and maybe we can get 
some new members.

Cheers,
Mary