Subtleties in the OASIS TC Member Attendance Rules

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

Harri Reddy recently drew my attention to an aspect of the TC membership
rules which I had not correctly understood. Perhaps this is old news to some
of you, but I believe it would surprise most OASIS members.

Suppose a member misses 2 meetings in a row. They are sent a warning and
they attend the next meeting. So far so good. However, unless they attend
the NEXT meeting, they will lose membership, as they will have missed 3 out
of 4 meetings. In other words, the pattern N-N-Y-N should be treated the
same as N-Y-N-N.

Yet it seems completely unintuitive to send a warning to someone right after
they have attended a meeting. On the other hand, it seems unintuitive to
terminate someone who attended the previous meeting and received no warning
message.

Actually it is not entirely clear this this is legal under the TC rules
which say:

(i). A member shall be warned by mail from the chair of the TC upon their
first failure to attend two out of every three successive meetings of the
TC. Membership shall be terminated if the member fails to attend the next
meeting following transmittal of the warning or if the member consistently
fails to attend two out of every three meetings.

(this section is not affected by Karl's proposed changes)

This seems to say that a) it is only necessary to warn a person once and b)
you can only terminate the immediately after a warning (except in the case
of consistent absences).

Why did I never notice this before? I think because in the TCs I have been
in either people come to practically every meeting or show up rarely or
never.

I am not ready to propose new wording for the TC process, but I do think
that we need to send out three different messages to warn people.

1) N-Y-N just a warning saying they must attend the next meeting

2) N-N a warning saying they must attend the next 2 meetings

3) N-N-Y a message saying that even though they attended the last meeting
they must still attend the next meeting.

Comments?

Hal