Quick recap of today's discussion

[Chet Ensign <chet.ensign@oasis-open.org>]

Gershon, JoAnn & members of the DITA Adoption TC, 

First of all, let me thank you all for inviting me to your meeting to talk about your frustrations. I appreciate your willingness to share your frustrations and the obstacles in your way and give me the chance to address them. 

We went over your list of specific problems achieving your objectives as a committee. I will not take up time repeating them here as they are clearly listed on the wiki. I will share the detailed list with OASIS staff. 

We did address a few issues today: 

- The problem with the lack of templates has been initially addressed by my providing guidelines to Gershon. There is more work for me to do on this subject but you can move forward with what has been provided to date. 

- You raised the issue that you were not allowed to put authorship attribution on committee documents and I told you that you can list the authors on papers. Frankly, given that we list chairs and editors on all our work products, I don't see what the objection could be on authors. 

- We discussed the requirement that drafts undergo 15 day public review before the TC can approve them as Committee Notes and I explained that this is the process as defined today and I cannot simply change it unilaterally. We discussed the effect that the designation "Draft" has on your publications (recipients ignore them) and the impact that the extra time has on your time to market. Several possible solutions were discussed and I promised to take this back to staff and the board to see if we can't get changes made. 

- We discussed the process by which the TC Process itself is modified, how long that takes, and the likelihood that changes will be made that can let you work more effectively. I told you that I am sure we will get these problems worked out one way or another because there is more appreciation of the impact that last years changes made on the work of the TCs and because we want to encourage more adoption activity not less. 

- We discussed how the process was interpreted in such a way that you were blocked from doing presentations and webinars. I told you that I will see if I can get more background so that I understand what might have led to that but that we will sort it out such that you can get back to doing that. Again, we want to encourage more of that, not less. 

- We discussed the suggestion that a new type committee - an Adoption Committee - be created at OASIS to enable educational and promotional activity to be pursued without violating the process controls that clearly need to be in place for Technical Committees. I agree to discuss this further with staff. 

- We discussed how your efforts to establish liaisons with other organizations stalled. I committed to reviewing our liaison policy and providing you with an explanation of the steps. TC liaisons with other organizations is supported by our process. 

- We touched on DITA XML.ORG but you explained that there are internal TC discussions that you need to have before we discuss it further. 

- We touched on translations of DITA specifications and other work products and I agreed to look into the OASIS policy on translations and get back to you. 

Please let me know if there is anything else you would like noted here. I will be back to you with additional information this week. 

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: +1 973-378-3472
Mobile: +1 201-341-1393

Follow OASIS on:
LinkedIn:    http://linkd.in/OASISopen
Twitter:        http://twitter.com/OASISopen
Facebook:  http://facebook.com/oasis.open