SCs and work products [was: DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 1 March 2011]

["Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com>]

[This is not a correction of the minutes.  It is a comment
about OASIS process inspired by something in the minutes.]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Nevin (bnevin) [mailto:bnevin@cisco.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 2011 March 01 12:45
> To: dita
> Subject: [dita] DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 1 March 2011

Regarding:

>  9.  NEW ITEM: Vertical industry vocabulary in DITA 1.3

> This is related to the discussion that led to a proposal to factorize
> into separate packages.  Either develop a base spec that is part of the
> DITA spec, or produce a delta spec that requires its own approval
> process. Still very sympathetic to this, but the counter-arguments were
> compelling, and seem still to be effective. Kris: and the OASIS
> approval process is more complex now, there's even more overhead.
> 
> Those who were not in that conversation were surprised at the size of
> the 1.2 spec.
> 
> If a SC does the work, a usable work product can be created as a
> committee draft, and that will be adopted as a de facto standard. There
> shouldn't be an assumption that it will be part of the core DITA
> standard.  If no one wants to own it, why should we do it?

Just to verify a part of the process:

Per my understanding, an SC can "do work", but they cannot 
create a committee draft.  The parent TC is the only entity 
that can create a deliverable of any kind.

So even if an SC does a bunch of work and creates some documents,
if the TC doesn't want to approve it as a TC work product, nothing 
can be published.

I would not want to see an OASIS SC trying to make something a 
de facto standard if the parent TC doesn't even approve of it.

paul