RE: [chairs] initial review of OASIS TC Process changes

["Hal Lockhart" <hlockhar@bea.com>]

> 1)   I think that if you're going to raise the vote percentage required to
> approave an OASIS Open Standard, then there also has to be some way to
> incent the membership to cast a vote.  I too agree that apathy is a real
> problem and raising things to 20% would cause significant difficulty in
> completing the process unless soemthing else is done to encourage voting.
> In either event, I would be comtemplating something more like 15%, rather
> than 20% as a start.

I don't personally feel strongly about the % required for approval, but to
some extent, this is a big company vs. small company issue. I feel well
qualified, having just moved from a small company to a big one. A smaller
company is going to be focussed on the specs that bear on their product
line. They will usually only have one or two people who do standards and
these people have expertise only in that problem domain. A larger company
will have more interests and more people with different skills. The range of
TC subjects is so broad that no one or even two people can have enough
knowledge to have an intelligent opinion on all potential specifications. I
don't think we want to encourage people to vote who do understand the spec.

Also, I haven't looked at the numbers, but I am pretty sure that as OASIS
memership has increased, the percentage of smaller companies has increased.
This is because the larger companies joined a long time ago. If OASIS has a
goal, as I understand it, to encourage TCs to go all the way to OASIS
Standards, and not stop at Committee Spec, which was often the practice in
the past, we should make sure that the % required is practical and
achievable for the common case of a spec that covers only a narrow field,
but is not controversial within that field. I think the rules about negative
votes provide a significant protection against someone slipping through a
specification that is not generally supported.

Hal