Voting membership in the UBL TC

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

Hello UBL TC,

As I've been telling you in our phone conferences for several
weeks now, OASIS has instituted new process rules that will
require a wholesale revision of our TC membership categories.
Under the revised process, missing two meetings in a row
automatically changes your membership status from voting to
nonvoting.  It's pretty obvious to everyone that this new
criterion was poorly conceived, and we can probably expect another
revision next month to correct it, but in the meantime, that's the
rule.  It's now my job as your chair to go through the TC roster
and make changes accordingly.

Since I only started telling you about this at the beginning of
May, I'm going to begin enforcing the rule at the end of next week
(the week of 6 June).  You can see where you stand by checking out
the spreadsheet at

   http://ibiblio.org/bosak/ubl/attendance.sxc

(This file is in standard OASIS Open Document format, which can be
read using free OpenOffice software from openoffice.org.)

Note that I'm considering our weekly TC meeting to be the union
set of the three conferences we're now running to accommodate
members living in different time zones.  In other words, attending
any one of the weekly conferences counts as attending that week's
TC meeting.  So you really have no excuse for not keeping up your
attendance if you want to retain voting membership.  For
reference, here's our summer conference call schedule:

   WEEKLY PACIFIC UBL TC MEETING
   00H30 - 02H30 UTC EVERY TUESDAY (MONDAY IN THE AMERICAS)
      17h30 - 19h30 Mon San Francisco
      20h30 - 22h30 Mon Washington
      08h30 - 10h30 Tue Hong Kong, Singapore, Perth, Beijing
      09h30 - 11h30 Tue Seoul, Tokyo
      10h30 - 12h30 Tue Sydney

   WEEKLY EUROPE/ASIA UBL TC MEETING
   08H00 - 10H00 UTC EVERY WEDNESDAY
      09h00 - 11h00 Wed London
      10h00 - 12h00 Wed Copenhagen
      16h00 - 18h00 Wed Hong Kong, Singapore, Perth, Beijing
      17h00 - 19h00 Wed Seoul, Tokyo
      18h00 - 20h00 Wed Sydney

   WEEKLY ATLANTIC UBL TC MEETING
   15H00 - 17H00 UTC EVERY WEDNESDAY
      08h00 - 10h00 Wed San Francisco
      11h00 - 13h00 Wed Washington
      16h00 - 18h00 Wed London
      17h00 - 19h00 Wed Copenhagen

What this boils down to is: if you didn't attend any of the calls
this week and you don't attend any of the calls next week, then
you're no longer going to be a voting member of the UBL TC.  Is
that so terrible?  Well, no.  As a nonvoting member, you can do
almost anything that a voting member can do, you just can't vote
(and you're not included in quorum counts).  It is NOT necessary
to be a voting member of the UBL TC in order to be a voting member
of a UBL subcommittee.  So if you're currently working in a
subcommittee and don't care whether you're a voting member of the
TC, don't worry about it.

If you do want to retain voting membership in the TC but are
planning to be absent on vacation, then you should send me a
request for a leave of absence (LOA), which will automatically be
granted unless you've already taken an LOA this year.  I've gone
ahead and entered an LOA for Mark Crawford and Tony Coates,
because they notified me that they will be on vacation all or part
of this month.  Send LOA requests right before you want to start
your absence; don't bother sending them in advance -- I'll just
lose track of them.

If you have questions about the OASIS TC process, see

   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php

Jon Bosak
Chair, OASIS UBL TC