GitHub etc.(long post...sorry)

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

Hi Folks,

Couple of things:

1. The GitHub repository was discussed in the main TC meeting this morning, as was other off-site tools such as GoogleDocs. Ken pointed us to the OASIS Technical Committee (TC) Process document at 

https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process

particularly Section 2.8 on TC Visability, which says:

The official copies of all resources of the TC and its associated Subcommittees, including web pages, documents, email lists and any other records of discussions, must be located only on facilities designated by OASIS. TCs and SCs may not conduct official business or technical discussions, store documents, or host web pages on servers or systems not designated by OASIS. All web pages, documents, ballot results and email archives of all TCs and SCs shall be publicly visible.

Both GitHub and GoogleDocs would seem to be in conflict with this, although as it was pointed out in the call, at least GitHub is an open standard, which can't be said about GoogleDocs. Many folks on the call were less than happy with the OASIS Wiki, which would seem to be the only official collaboration tool available. It was suggested that getting the work done was important, so perhaps we could use private tools such as GitHub as long as we put the official documents on the SC's public document repository, which would be here:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legalcitem-courts

and conduct our technical discussions on this listserv. This seems reasonable to me.

Now Frank has been doing some wonderful work on GitHub, merging the reporter data from CourtListener and the CSL project with what we have been doing and making it truly usable for us and other projects (like the Free Law Project). He thinks we should open the repository up so that others can collaborate. I agree, and I think this would dovetail nicely with the OASIS rules. If the work being done on the GitHub repository is no longer officially OASIS work, we don't have to worry about their rules. The GitHub repository becomes a tool for the whole free law community, that we in the OASIS SC can use as a resource for our work. We could rename it to something like the "Court Citation Project" or even something less lame than that. How do folks feel about this?

For some examples of what Frank has done, look at:

http://jqheywood.github.io/CourtsSC/index.html

and

http://jqheywood.github.io/CourtsSC/states.html


2. In response to the discussion in our last SC meeting, and never being afraid to play the fool (or, if you ask my kids, BE the fool, but I digress), I asked the assembled TC what exactly a use case was, and what are we supposed to be producing. Everybody seemed happy that I had asked. Someone (I'm not sure who) described it thusly: HTML5 is the standard, a web page demonstrating all the different parts of HTML5 is the use case. John J. reminded us all that the SCs should not get lost in the weeds of detail, as he has seen other projects flounder because of it. We should be looking for the common things in these citations and writing them up. I think we may be close to ready for this in the US context very soon.

Well, time to go home and make my eldest his birthday dinner (he turned 17 today),

John

-- 
John Quentin Heywood
heywood@american.edu