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Subject: [chairs] TC mailing list guidelines


I wonder whether I am alone in finding the current OASIS guidelines on TC 
mailing lists to be unsatisfactory.  The current guidelines are at

  http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/guidelines.shtml#maillist

What I find unsatisfactory is the way public mailing lists are handled. 
The guidelines recommend a single public mailing list named *-comment for 
"general public discussion of the TC work", which anybody can subscribe to, 
but only subcribers can post to.  I have two problems with this:

1. It's misleading and confusing to call it a comment list when it's really 
a discussion list.

2. There ought to be a way for people to submit comments on specs without 
subscribing to a mailing list.

The RELAX NG specs say that comments should be sent to the RELAX NG comment 
mailing list.  I regularly get complaints from people who try to submit 
comments but get their message bounced because they are not subscribers. 
People expect the *-comment lists to work like the W3C *-comment lists, 
where anybody can post without subcription.

We should not be erecting barriers that make it inconvenient for people to 
submit comments on our specifications.  The kind of people we particularly 
want to get comments from are typically overwhelmed with email already and 
are reluctant to subscribe to a mailing list just to submit a comment.

I believe it is very important that there should be *-comment lists that 
anybody can post to.  It is highly desirable that such lists are 
spam-filtered either by software or by human (no, I'm not volunteering!). 
These should be open to subscription only by TC members.  Typically the 
chair would appoint a TC member to monitor the comment lists and collate 
comments for TC consideration. I would also be in favour of having a public 
discussion list appropriately named.

James




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