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Subject: UBL Liaison SC wind-up meeting 29 March 2004
Hello UBL Liaisons and LSC observers, This message is intended to serve two purposes: first, to remind you that we have a regularly scheduled UBL Liaison Subcommittee call this coming Monday morning 29 March at 7 a.m. California time, and second, to follow up concretely on a suggestion made during the LSC meeting 25 February that we wind up the LSC as currently constituted and restart it after the TC meeting in Hong Kong with a charter better suited to what we intend for UBL 1.1. 1. Our next UBL Liaison SC meeting will take place 07h00 (standard time in San Francisco) on Monday 29 March 2004. This is 16h00 (daylight time) in London, 17h00 (daylight time) in Copenhagen, and 23h00 (standard time) in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Perth. That's right -- London and Copenhagen switch to daylight time 28 March, but San Francisco and other major cities in the U.S. make the change on 4 April. We will use this number for the call: ############################################# U.S. domestic toll-free number: (866)545-5198 Int. access/caller paid number: (865)521-8904 Access code: 3470093 ############################################# Preliminary agenda: - UBL 1.0 progress - Liaison reports - Calendar review and speaker planning - Restarting the LSC - Other business 2. Here's what I intend to cover Under the agenda item "restarting the LSC." The UBL Liaison SC was set up in order to get input from various organizations interested in helping us to create a workable set of schemas for UBL 1.0. I think that it has served this purpose quite well, particularly in the early stages of the effort, though there remain some incompletely digested items that will have to be followed up properly in the release later this year that we are calling UBL 1.1. It was understood from the beginning that organizations appointing liaisons to UBL were not committing to UBL adoption. But it seems to me that continuing to list all the current liaisons as active following the announcement of UBL 1.0 may be misunderstood as a formal endorsement of the work as finally released. I would of course very much like to see such endorsements, but I don't think that this is the way to do it; I think it would be better to use this address list as a way to invite quotes for a press release later this spring after UBL 1.0 passes through OASIS standardization. What I would like to suggest instead is that we wind up the current LSC, referring to it historically in the future as "the UBL 1.0 Liaison SC," and then figure out how to incorporate the liaison functions moving forward. I can see several different ways to do this. The most straightforward continuation of the current arrangement would be to start a new subcommittee whose membership would consist of liaisons appointed by organizations with an active interest in using UBL 1.0 or in helping us advance toward UBL 1.1. (UBL 1.1 is the name for a release planned later this year that would incorporate refinements to the data definitions based on the work of the UBL localization SCs and backward-compatible schema modifications that would incorporate further work on a number of deferred XML schema technical issues.) A reconstituted liaison subcommittee would have two main functions: - Represent industry data standards organizations intending to create industry-specific profiles of UBL in the 1.1 time frame. - Maintain relationships with organizations sharing a desire to coordinate as closely as possible in the future evolution of UBL. I'm hoping that this would include our liaisons with as many of the organizations currently participating as possible, but I don't want to make any assumptions about this. Such liaisons would serve principally to convey scheduling information to UBL and to report on UBL progress back to the participating organizations. It's an open question in my mind as to whether these two purposes are best served by one subcommittee or two. My inclination is to prefer to see both sets of interests represented in one set of meetings, so I would prefer at this point to see a "UBL 1.1 liaison SC" not split along functional lines. But there is another axis to consider here: time zones. We have demonstrated that it is virtually impossible to hold one set of meetings that can be attended by everyone whose organization might be interested in UBL. This consideration gains force if (as I expect) the groups interested in defining industry profiles of UBL are organized regionally. This thought leads to the notion of two sets of liaisons that would meet by phone as "the UBL Atlantic Liaisons" and "the UBL Pacific Liaisons." This is in line with what we have attempted with some success to accomplish with "Atlantic coordination calls" and "Pacific coordination calls." A similar "hemispherical" organization is beginning to emerge with regard to the UBL localization SCs, which until now have all been centered in Asia but with the recent addition of the ESLSC are going to extend across Europe and the Americas as well. The daunting prospect of actually trying to organize and run all these calls leads me to a rather radical solution that I would like the current LSC to consider before I take it to the TC. There appears to be general support for the idea that we will have to reduce the number of UBL SCs following the release of UBL 1.0. The ideal would be to do all our business in UBL plenary TC calls; if we did that, we wouldn't have all the communication problems that we have been experiencing as we try to reach agreements that go beyond individual SCs. There are two things that prevent the adoption of this obvious solution: first, OASIS TC rules that we cannot change require a majority of the entire TC in order to constitute a quorum; and second, we cannot get everyone into the same time slot. Traditionally, the quorum problem has been solved in organizations like ours by lowering the percentage of voting members needed to constitute a quorum. It is quite common among societies with a distributed membership to set quorums as low as 10 percent of the members. We cannot do this for the TC, but we certainly could do it for specific SCs. So here is a plan that I'd like us to talk about in the call on Monday: - Do away with the idea of liaisons as a separate subcommittee and just appoint liaisons to the UBL TC itself. - Form two "coordination subcommittees": an Atlantic Coordination Subcommittee (ACSC) and a Pacific Coordination Subcommittee (PCSC). - Make the voting membership of both the ACSC and the PCSC identical to the voting membership of the whole TC (so any voting TC member can participate in either SC), but lower the quorum requirement to 10 percent. - Hold weekly ACSC and PCSC meetings on the same day in California, for example the ACSC at 8 a.m. on Monday in San Francisco and the PCSC that same day at 4:30 p.m. in San Francisco (which is at reasonable times Tuesday morning in most of Asia and Australia). These times have worked out well when we've tried this in the past. - Make sure that any important issues are properly noticed in meeting announcements so that everyone with an opinion will attend one of the two coordination meetings. - Perform all management business in these two weekly meetings: liaison reports, calendar planning, plenary meeting schedules, cross-SC queries and issue tracking, translation issues, everything. - Attempt to achieve a consensus on all major issues in both *CSC meetings and secure formal TC approval by posting the outcomes by mail and relying on common consent to move forward. Then the only issues needing resolution by the TC would be issues in which consensus proved impossible to achieve in the weekly *CSC meetings. Please think about this and be ready to discuss on Monday. Other ideas are most welcome. Jon
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