RE: [chairs] Re: Committee Notes

["Gershon Joseph (gerjosep)" <gerjosep@cisco.com>]

Comments below, inline.

Cheers,
Gershon


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Mischkinsky [mailto:jeff.mischkinsky@oracle.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 5:09 PM
To: Gershon Joseph (gerjosep)
Cc: Norman Walsh; Mary McRae; members@lists.oasis-open.org; chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [chairs] Re: Committee Notes


On Dec 13, 2010, at 11:38 AM, Gershon Joseph (gerjosep) wrote:

> The DITA Adoption TC is *very* concerned by this. Our TC produced  
> about 10 feature articles in the space of less than a year, and  
> under the new process it would take us years.
How does a 30 day public review add years?
[Gershon Joseph (gerjosep)] There is a 30 day initial public review period, then a 15 day review every time we update the document. I doubt we'll get zero comments every time we do a public review.

> Our concern is that by the time our non-normative feature articles  
> finally get to the users, they won't be relevant anymore. The  
> purpose of these feature articles is to educate the public on  
> upcoming features in the future DITA spec, and now we shall be  
> unable to deliver these well-received articles as fast as the market  
> requires.

If the lifetime of these articles is on the order 30 days, then i have  
to ask why the bother/concern?
   If its longer, then i don't see how 30 days is a big factor,  
especially since the docs are all public when they are still in draft  
stage.
[Gershon Joseph (gerjosep)] The lifetime of the document is probably infinite, but the time to market is critical here. Users are begging us to release feature articles that help them to understand and implement features, and how to best use the features that the spec supports. Vendors are asking for use cases. If it takes one to three months to release each article (optimistically) due to the new OASIS process, then articles get to the users much later, leaving them to guess, or work without guidance, during that period of time before we release the article.

> So we're effectively punishing our users and hindering adoption  
> instead of promoting adoption.
I would say that we are encouraging TC's to carefully consider  
documents before they are adopted and made "official".
[Gershon Joseph (gerjosep)] TCs carefully consider documents before voting them to approval -- at least, on the DITA Adoption TC, we have a thorough review of each document, with several iterations made before we approve it. I don't see how a public review is going to add to the already high quality of our adoption-related artifacts.