I'm reminded of the maxim in any good initial business plan asking - what is the exit strategy?
Seems that OASIS has criteria based mainly around number of emails posted, who's posting them (apart from the TC chair) and how many meetings and minutes you have posted.
As TC chairs however - I think we deserve more support than OASIS hitting our TC with FUD messages to bolster continuation of the technical work.
Several members I recently canvassed told me they would like to do more than observer but their company is restricting hours and requiring formal manager approval and justification for any new TC related work - even just reading emails or joining a group. Given those types of challenges its little wonder that typical TC work is being driven by just a handful of individuals.
OASIS needs to therefore do more in terms of assisting garnering support for our work. So for example - one simple thing I notice that is misleading - is that Kavi only shows voting members - what should be shown also is the total number of observers (just the count), and non-voting members underneath that also on the whole roster.
Clearly TC chairs have a huge role in continuing work of a TC. In the lifecycle of a standard it is way more than just calling meetings, writing specifications and publishing schema.
Rather than FUD messages from OASIS staff to our TC - we need more informal coordination to help with members who may be contemplating contributing - or just testing the pulse = looking to help get more involvement and so on by working with the TC chairs and reaching out to potential new resources.
Also - chairs usually know way more about what is really going on. The mailing list only tells one small part of the picture - in terms of what is external parties are doing, or planning to do with a specification, or additional potential resources to advance new work.
The current administrative door slamming by OASIS seems to be based solely on reducing the number of TCs to some acceptable lower number - rather than any rationale based on the importance of work - and need to actively foster and help TC chairs gain support either within their TC or with external industry groups or academic institutes who may benefit or contribute further.
Everyone is burned out of course on standards work - and its now layers of burn out over burn out. Now in tough economic days it seems that bean counting and ROI have totally taken over the equation of specification development - rather than anything else relating to technical value and incubating potential groundbreaking or interesting XML capabilities within OASIS.
Ironically the small independent members would appear to be those that have the most flexibility to continue OASIS work and yet OASIS itself it set to penalize them for trying!
Thanks, DW