Re: [chairs] Subtleties in the OASIS TC Member Attendance Rules

["Karl F. Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

I appreciate the input (and always happy to hear suggestions) but this 
is something that I'll have to bring up with the Board's TC Process 
subcommittee, who is currently working on a revision of the Process 
document.

-Karl




jon.bosak@sun.com wrote:
> It seems that several of us are in agreement on the desirability
> of creating an official category for members of a TC mailing list
> who are not also members (strictly speaking) of a TC.  The
> question is what to call this category.  Scott likes "nonvoting
> member" for marketing reasons.  Eduardo and I dislike this
> nomenclature because in parliamentary practice (meaning Robert's,
> which specifies 99.9 per cent of the rules that govern formal TC
> operation) the word "member" means "voting member," "voting
> member" is frowned upon as a term containing a redundancy, and
> "nonvoting member" is considered to be a contradiction in terms.
> 
> I suggest that we try for a category name that does not contain an
> internal contradiction but serves better for marketing purposes
> than "observer with posting privileges."  How about "participant"?
> That would not only serve almost as well as "member" in the resume
> scenario but would also have the benefit of truthfully
> representing the nature of one's involvement in the process.
> 
> Jon
> 
>    Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 13:34:26 -0700
>    From: Eduardo Gutentag <Eduardo.Gutentag@sun.com>
>    Cc: Jon.Bosak@sun.com, karl.best@oasis-open.org, hlockhar@bea.com,
> 	   chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
> 
>    Seems like I said something that was open to misinterpretation. So,
>    just in case, I'd like to clarify that my comment, "What I would like
>    to see is for the Kavi process to follow the OASIS TC process and not
>    the other way around..." was not meant in any way to disparage the
>    participation of observers in the mailing lists. What I did mean,
>    though, was that I did not think it was appropriate to munge TC
>    participation with mailing list participation; that until very
>    recently there was no language separating the two, and those who
>    wanted to monitor the lists were invited to join the TCs, thus
>    potentially inflating the ranks of the quorum-busters ;). When a
>    chair goes to the Add a member section of the roster maintenance
>    page, the chair is still told that someone can be added as a member
>    of the TC because he/she has qualified according to the rules, which
>    is false, and that some ballots may allow only members with voting
>    privileges to vote, which is also false, because according to the
>    process there are no such ballots, IOW only voting members (which
>    is the only kind of *TC* members there are) can vote...
> 
>    So it's not that I'm unhappy with the functionality of the mailing
>    lists; it the language and lack of differentiation between mailing
>    lists and TCs that make me less than happy.
> 
>    Scott McGrath wrote:
>    > Allow me to toss out a members' perspective, one that has little to do
>    > with the strictly technical components of TC participation.
>    >    > People derive benefits from 
>    > 'being a member" of OASIS TCs for a lot of different reasons.  Some such
>    > reasons are strictly warm and fuzzy stuff--it makes them feel like an
>    > important part of the process. Further, I would wager OASIS TC
>    > membership is in more than a few employee performance evaluations, goals
>    > etc as a measure of meeting some corporate objective.  
>    >    > That said, we should be careful not to marginalize or sideline those
>    > that can only contribute minimally and cannot commit to travel, meeting
>    > attendance, concalls at 3am etc  I think Jon's point is valid, these
>    > members are an important part of the process and we should find ways to
>    > enable that. (remembering these are dues paying members like all others)
>    >    > Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of the term non-voting member,
>    > I think it serves the above needs well and I think one intuitively knows
>    > what these mean.  I think grouping those with some valid input with
>    > other non-contributing Observers is less correct than grouping all
>    > contributing persons as members, where only those seeking and abiding by
>    > the restrictions have voting rights, quorum implications etc.
>    >    > Scott...
>    >    > -----Original Message-----
>    > From: jon.bosak@sun.com [mailto:jon.bosak@sun.com] 
>    > Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 2:37 PM
>    > To: karl.best@oasis-open.org
>    > Cc: Eduardo.Gutentag@sun.com; Jon.Bosak@sun.com; hlockhar@bea.com;
>    > chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
>    > Subject: Re: [chairs] Subtleties in the OASIS TC Member Attendance Rules
>    >    > I certainly don't disagree with the premise that the kavi
>    > interface should align with the official OASIS TC process, but I
>    > am finding the category that allows observers to post on occasion
>    > to be extremely useful from an organizational standpoint.  The
>    > problem, as I see it, lies in calling this category "nonvoting
>    > member," which from a parliamentary standpoint is a contradiction
>    > in terms.  The interface should be distinguishing between
>    > "read/write" and "read-only" observers rather than between "voting"
>    > and "nonvoting" members.
>    >    > | I'm working an fixes to Kavi to support this, but unfortunately
>    > | it's not going well...
>    >    > Since we're starting to depend fairly heavily on the (badly named)
>    > "nonvoting member" category, I'm actually glad to hear that you're
>    > not making rapid progress on fixing this....
>    >    > Jon
> 
> You may leave a Technical Committee at any time by visiting http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/chairs/members/leave_workgroup.php
> 
> 
> 


-- 
=================================================================
Karl F. Best
Vice President, OASIS
office  +1 978.667.5115 x206     mobile +1 978.761.1648
karl.best@oasis-open.org      http://www.oasis-open.org