OASIS chairs,
Attached is a preview of the changes to the OASIS TC
Process that I will announce next week at the Membership
Meeting occurring in conjunction with the Borderless Cyber
event in New York City. I wanted to give you all an advance
look at this major reorganization.
The Board Process Committee has been hard at work on these
modifications for over a year. We had several objectives:
- To simplify - to make the rules less verbose, imposing,
and complicated while retaining essence of our rules &
values;
- To weed out – to minimize "how" details in the rules and
focus on the "what;"
- To re-organize – to extract content that can apply to all
OASIS activities into their own documents so that the TC
Process focuses on the rules that apply to specifically to the
work of Technical Committees;
- To support – to set up our policies so that they also
work smoothly for other initiatives such as our coming open
source initiative.
In the attached zip file, you will find copies of the new
policy documents. These are in Word for now but the official
versions will be published in HTML on the OASIS web site prior
to taking effect. There are three:
- The streamlined TC Process, trimmed down to focus on the
content that applies specifically to running Technical
Committees and to advancing work through the OASIS process. A
red-lined copy is included so that you can review the changes
in detail;
- The new OASIS Defined Terms document, collecting all the
defined terms that apply to OASIS policies into one common
source; and
- The new OASIS Committee Operations Process, documenting
rules that apply to the work of any committee.
With one exception, we kept the rules as they stand. But we
removed a lot of the language that made them hard to
understand. Sections like Leaves of Absence, Allowed Changes
and Designated Cross-Reference Changes for example have been
reduced to focus and clarify the intent of the rules while
letting common sense in their implementation prevail.
That one exception? It is a pretty big one. The way OASIS
Standards are approved is about to change.
Why? Because the current balloting period is a
fingernail-biting exercise for TCs. It motivates them to field
'get out the vote' efforts, increasing the volume of emails to
other TCs and OASIS Primary Representatives, and, most
importantly, it does little, as far as we could see from five
years worth of ballot results, to improve the quality of final
work.
Instead, OASIS is moving to a call for consent/objections
model. We will start from the assumption that the experts know
their stuff and that other Members respect that. A ballot will
be posted but the assumption will be that the Candidate OASIS
Standard will become an OASIS Standard *unless* organizational
members have reason to object.
So if the Candidate OASIS Standard receives no votes at all
or only affirmative votes, it will become an OASIS Standard.
If, however, valid objections are entered by 15 or more
organizational members, then the call will fail. If objections
less than 15 are made, the TC will have options for proceeding
with objection handling and the possibility of a second call
for consent. Section 2.8.3 Call for consent for OASIS Standard
has all the details.
We believe this shift will reduce both the stress and the
email traffic associated with the current balloting process,
while bringing forward meaningful feedback on the rare
occasion where there may be reason to do so.
Please feel free to share this with your Technical
Committees and, if you wish, share your reactions and
feedback. If you do want to share comments, please send them
to the
oasis-board-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
mailing list and copy me.
Best regards,
/chet
----------------
Chet Ensign
Director of Standards Development and TC Administration
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information
society
http://www.oasis-open.org
Primary: +1 973-996-2298
Mobile: +1 201-341-1393