I think we’re going to
have to carefully evaluate who are audience is and where they hang out. The
process following seems well designed for official documents relating to and
speaking to OASIS members, or for wider public distribution of documents officially
representing the OASIS standards charter.
In terms of informal adoption
documents, helping people get up to speed, as opposed to defining standards, I
wonder if a public venue like dita.xml.org would be better, where anyone can
join and contribute without a protracted review phase. I am very concerned that
a protracted, complicated review phase with multiple votes and sign-offs is
likely to curtail enthusiasm for writing helpful articles on a regular basis
that are difficult enough to garner given our limited time and day jobs.
We could have a quicker, internal review as a “workgroup” within
the Adoption TC, posting to dita.org. These would not be official standards
documents representing the TC. Individual authorship could be noted.
We might have a triage for those
documents that are official, which follow the TC process outlined following,
and those that are not official, which are posted outside the auspices of the
TC.
The downside I can see for unofficial
documents is that they lose the “branding” of the Adoption TC,
which I think is unfortunate, given that disseminating adoption information is
the primary purpose of the TC (as opposed to coming up with standards). I do
not know how to rectify branding, but perhaps this problem is better than curtailing
article production.
Troy
From: Kristen Eberlein
[mailto:keberlein@sdl.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:25 PM
To: DITA Adoption TC
Subject: [dita-adoption] Summary of new OASIS process
Key links:
OASIS
Technical Committee Process: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php
TC
Administration Requests: http://docs.oasis-open.org/templates/TCAdminRequests.html
Here is a summary
of how the new OASIS processes will affect our feature articles
·
Our
feature articles will need to follow the guidelines outlined in
“Section 2.1.8 Work Product Quality”: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php#specQuality
. This means, among other items, that we need to provide editable source, XHTML
(or HTML), and PDF.
·
Our
feature articles (now called committee notes) must follow the processes
outlined in “Section 3 Approval Process.”
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php#standApprovProcess
Here is my understanding of how the new process will affect our work:
o
We
register the work product: http://marypmcrae.com/wptemplate-request
o
We
approve the work product as a “Committee note draft.” This requires
a full majority vote of the TC.
o
We
decide to submit a committee note draft for public review; this also requires a
full majority vote of the TC. If approved by the TC, this draft becomes a
“Committee Note Public Review Draft”; it must be accompanied by a
“recommendation from the TC of external stakeholders who should be
notified of the review.”
o
We
request a 30-day public review from Mary McRae: http://marypmcrae.com/30-day-cndpr-request
. This request form requires the following information, among others:
§ URI for the committee note draft at http://docs.oasis-open.org/
§ Link to the minutes for the Adoption
TC meeting at which the TC approved the committee note draft and voted to
request a review
o
Mary
McRae announces the public review to the OASIS membership list and
“optionally on other public mail lists.”
o
Non-TC
Members post comments to the TC's public-comment list. [Do we have such as
list?] We must acknowledge the receipt of each comment and track the comments
received; at the end of the review period, we need to post a list of how each
comment has been handled to our e-mail list.
o
If
we make ANY changes to the committee note draft as a result of the public
review, we need to start the whole process over. The review period this time is
only 15 days.
o After a public review that does not
generates any comments that result in the changes to the committee note draft,
we can approve the work product as a committee note. This requires a special
majority vote of the TC. If the 15-day review generated any comments, this
vote cannot be held before seven days have passed since the close of the public
review. To conduct the special majority vote, we need to notify Mary McRae that
the TC is ready to vote and provide her with the location of the editable
versions of the files. She sets up and conducts the ballot.
It’s not clear to me whether
we’ll need to request that OASIS create and upload the committee note
draft for us; there is a form for this at http://marypmcrae.com/cnd-creation-request
.
Best regards,
Kris
Kristen
James Eberlein l DITA
Architect and Technical Specialist l SDL
Structured Content Technologies Division l (t) + 1
(919) 682-2290 l keberlein@sdl.com
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