RE: [chairs] Why the DITA Adoption TC cares about "templates"

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

I am not going to get into the respective qualification of tools, although I
very much favor Patrick's suggestion about tool chains and having the
guidance and confirmable metrics necessary to get to the end of the chain
with a deliverable in the correct format in the chosen forms.

With regard to Adoption TCs, I think there is a conflict with wanting an
OASIS imprimatur but not being in the OASIS specification or technical note
business.  I have nothing useful to offer in that regard, although I don't
think loosening Committee Note requirements is a solution, considering the
variety of cases where public review is quite appropriate and also an
important quality safeguard on an OASIS work product.

I once undertook a survey of the OASIS TCs and their work products.  At the
time, I noticed that non-Adoption TCs have produced Committee Drafts of
supplemental/promotional materials and apparently stopped there.  Other TCs
have produced such materials but not made them TC work products as much as
companion works developed by members of the TC.  Advocacy emerges in many
forms.

With regard to Committee Notes, I am aware of two non-Adoption TCs (OIC and
TAG) that have recently produced Committee Specifications of documents that
will have future editions produced as Committee Notes.  

 - Dennis

SOME ANECDOTAL DETAIL

 1. The OpenDocument Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) TC recently
approved "The State of ODF Interoperability Version 1.0" as a Committee
Specification.  That ballot concluded on 2010 December 9, under the old
rules.  These assessment reports are deliverables under the charter of the
OIC TC and while Public Reviews and quality checks were challenging for this
first effort, we have managed and I imagine will continue to do so with
periodic updates produced as Committee Notes.
   The OIC is also undertaking to produce advisory information on how ODF
producer software, consumer software, and users can navigate the variability
in a way that enhances the practical achievement of interoperability (and
also avoid misunderstandings that have been seen to lead to unwitting
conformance deviations).  The notion is that such advisories will be
compiled in Committee Notes after they have stabilized, received appropriate
community scrutiny, etc.  Requiring Public Review is very appropriate in
this case.  (If there were specifications undertaken in the OIC TC, they
would likely be for some sort of targeted profile, test assertions for
profile targets, etc.  That is speculative at this point, although it fits
in the scope of the OIC TC.)

2. The Test Assertions Guidelines (TAG) TC recently approved three Committee
Specifications.  There is a Test Assertion Model and also a Test Assertion
Markup Language (TAML).  There is also a Test Assertion Guidelines Committee
Specification that is an expository guide to the model and its usage,
illustrated by informal test assertion statements that fall under the model.
The Test Assertion Guidelines CS would have been a Committee Note if it had
been produced under the new TC Policies.  The other two are standards-track
specifications.  My personal observation was that the public review process
was not burdensome for any of them and it was quite valuable, leading to
considerable improvement that was taken to what turned out to be the final
public reviews for these documents.


-----Original Message-----
From: Kristen Eberlein [mailto:keberlein@sdl.com] 
Sent: Saturday, December 25, 2010 09:51
To: Jeff Mischkinsky
Cc: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [chairs] Why the DITA Adoption TC cares about "templates"

Hi, Jeff.

Remember that the DITA Adoption TC does not produce specifications. (The
DITA TC does, of course, and we provide our specification in editable source
(DITA), XHTML, CHM, and PDF.)

The older versions of the TC Process were rather mute about TC work products
that were not specifications, such as the "feature articles" that the DITA
Adoption Committee produces. Being good, process-minded campers, we asked
Mary McRae how these articles needed to look and in what output format; she
pointed us to the OASIS white paper template for PDFs, and away we went.

As far as I can tell, OASIS only has two adoption committees:

* OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) Adoption Technical Committee
* OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee

[ ... ]