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Subject: RE: [chairs] OASIS Organizational Voting is Somewhat Absurd?


+1.  It’s not easy for even moderate-sized TC’s to avoid having to send out the plea for votes.  I can imagine that’s a huge pain for small TC’s. Especially since I seem to recall the rule used to be 10%, right?

 

Perhaps OASIS could establish official subject matter domains (e.g. the categories under which TC’s are listed on the web page).  Then each organization could declare as part of its membership, which of those domains it wishes to have votes in (perhaps an organization is required to choose some minimal number of them?).  Then the organizational votes for standardization could require some higher % of domain-qualified organizations to vote for the standardization of a spec.

 

There would need to be some mechanism to ensure a minimum level of participation in each domain, but it seems that could be worked out.

 

Rob Philpott
Senior Consulting Engineer
RSA Security Inc.
Tel: 781-515-7115
Mobile: 617-510-0893
Fax: 781-515-7020
Email:
rphilpott@rsasecurity.com
I-name:  =Rob.Philpott


From: Wachob, Gabe [mailto:gwachob@visa.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 12:28 PM
To: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [chairs] OASIS Organizational Voting is Somewhat Absurd?

 

An issue about the way OASIS holds organizational votes to move TC drafts to OASIS specifications has been gnawing on me for quite a while.

 

Under the current rules, 15% of organizational members have to vote yes on a specification. Currently, according to my rough research, this is 15% of 342 voting organizations or 52 positive votes required *minimum*.

 

Now, OASIS TCs do work in a number of very specialized areas yet votes are expected by the general organizational membership. An example is the recent request to vote on the CAP 1.1 standard. I have no reason to believe that CAP is not a fine proposal and worthy of approval, and I personally think it sounds valuable. However, I also have no way of knowing if there aren't serious problems with it. I am not a domain expert, and I doubt there are 52 organizations in OASIS that are.

 

Having been involved in LegalXML in the very early days, I can only imagine this issue about competence and interest in a specialized area could be even more acute for other topical areas.

 

It appears that the only way specifications like CAP can emerge as an OASIS specification is for parties to approve the spec who have no domain expertise and no business justification to invest time in reviewing the specification.  An OASIS specification vote then becomes largely a matter of rubberstamping the TC's output, thus undercutting the value of the "OASIS Specification" stamp of approval. Additionally, as a TC co-chair, I'm concerned that getting approval for a specification at the OASIS level is purely a political "vote for my spec PLEASE" effort which is a waste of time for the TC chair and a meaningless gesture for the organizational voters (a role I also play for Visa).

 

Does anyone else feel this way?

 

It would seem more rational to have some sort of process that requires review and positive acceptance by some subset of the membership (e.g. broken down by topical interest areas, etc) while retaining the right for *all* organizational members to object as they do now.

 

Thoughts?

 

    -Gabe


__________________________________________________
gwachob@visa.com
Chief Systems Architect
Innovation Group
Visa International
Phone: +1.650.432.3696   Fax: +1.650.554.6817

 



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