Notes from the meeting on 30 October 2014

[John Quentin Heywood <heywood@wcl.american.edu>]

Apparently, this email I sent on Thursday did not go out to the list, so
I am trying it again.

John

Hi Folks,

We had our conference call meeting today at 20:00 UTC. In addition to
myself, we had Ken Hirsh, Michael Neuren, and Frank Bennett in attendance.
We talked about our deliverables. We reviewed the document types listed
already on our wiki page and thought that they were a good start on the
2d of our deliverables (the overview of our scope and first list of doc
types). We discussed the addition of video and audio files, as well as
print and electronic correspondence. We decided that the video and audio
files are not really document types, but rather item types. And
correspondence was probably better addressed as a secondary source.
We liked the LegisSC's breakdown of use cases on their wiki page, and
will probably use it as well. We will organize our list by user
community, with each doctype examined by both. We agreed that this
involves a lot of duplication. Frank suggested a unified source document
with version control on GitHub. We would use MarkDown or
reStructuredText format. We could then produce specific deliverables
from this primary source. We all thought this was a fine idea. I will
check with OASIS to see if they have any problems with us using GitHub,
and if they are fine with it, set up a private repository and invite SC
members into it. I will also share the idea with the other SC chairs to
see if they wish to join us.
Our goal is to focus on minimalism and commonality; what is the minimum
information we need in a citation to describe and find the document.
To start, we are going to start with a fairly simple set: the US federal
courts. I will take a stab at this before our next meeting so that we
have an idea whether it is workable or not. Once we have the feds and
all their specialized courts, we will expand to the US state courts.
When that is complete, it will be a good example of a common law
jurisdiction. We will then test it by picking the most-different system
we can find. China was suggested; it is not common law (a homegrown
civil law-ish system) and is not in a roman alphabet. This will be a
useful check on whether we have the minimum fields necessary for
commonality. At that point we can reassess and see where we need to go next.
Our next meeting is going to be by conference call at 21:00 UTC (4:00 pm
EST), Thursday, 13 November 2014.
I will email updates on the GitHub setup when it is ready.

John

-- 
John Quentin Heywood
heywood@american.edu