RE: [chairs] Discontinuing Applicant and Prospective Member roles

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

Unfortunately this change still leaves one important problem unsolved.
When a person who is a member decides to stop participating in the TC
forever, they are still carried as a Member, just the same as somebody
who just lost voting status and will regain it shortly. Very likely this
person no longer works in the topic area. 

This causes considerable inconvenience in larger TCs, because this list
just gets longer and longer over time. For example, right now WSS has
21, SSTC has 20 and WS-SX has 40 non-voting members. At every meeting it
is either necessary to call all of these names, even though many have
said they never plan to attend, or to keep private records outside of
the OASIS system of who is active, but not currently voting.

It might be thought that these members need to be kept on the rolls in
order to understand who has incurred IP obligations. However, the
current system does not effectively do this, because obligated parties
will disappear if their account is removed from the OASIS system or if
their company drops their OASIS membership. Further, the obligation will
not be tracked correctly of they change employers and continue in the
same TC, as many people, including me, have done.

Hal 

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott McGrath [mailto:scott.mcgrath@oasis-open.org] 
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 6:07 PM
To: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [chairs] Discontinuing Applicant and Prospective Member roles

Chairs,

In response to your feedback, we are simplifying the various states
("roles") that a participant can occupy on the roster of a TC or SC.
This
is happening as part of our ongoing changes to automate roster
management
and reduce your need to "micro-manage" roster settings.

Now eligible OASIS member participants will only have one of the
following
roles:

Observer -- Has mail list subscription, no posting rights, no duties, no
vote.
Member -- Has mail list subscription, has posting rights, has the duties
of
a member, no vote.
Voting Member -- Member, plus has voting rights.
Leave of Absence -- 
TC Chair -- Voting Member, plus some administrative access to the TC's
roster and website database.
Secretary -- Same access rights as TC Chair

When an eligible person requests Member status, they will be added to
the
roster automatically--when the request is approved/confirmed by the
Primary
(or self-confirmed in the case of Individual and Associate members) This
process eliminates the need for the old roles of "Applicant", and
"Prospective Member"--and the need for you to manually transition
members
from those roles.

Please note that, in order to clean up the rosters, we are asking all
participants on your roster in these roles to complete their intended
transition to their desired and approved role. Starting on 31 March
2006, we
will begin to convert all people remaining in the current roles of
"Applicant" and "Prospective Member" to "Observer".  This is the likely
desired result, as most of the "stuck" members have remained so for 3 or
more months.  Their subscription will not be interrupted by our actions.
But
in order to become a TC "member", they will need to re-confirm their
intent
and permission to join as a member.   

Going forward, TC chairs should not manually add persons to the TC
roster,
because this shortcuts the membership qualification process.   Please
direct
their inquiries to the self-help "Join" link on members-only web page
for
your TC, which will invoke the new automated system and eliminate
further
administrative burden on you. 

As always, thank you for your support and patience as we make these
transitions to better serve you and your committee members.

Scott McGrath
Director of Member Services

Tel +1 978-667-5115 x202 
Fax +1 978-667-5114
scott.mcgrath@oasis-open.org

Plan on attending:
OASIS Symposium: The Meaning of Interoperability, 
9-12 May, San Francisco 
http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium_2006/