Re: [legalcitem] GitHub etc.(long post...sorry)

Frank, Monica, Brian et al -

Apologies for not getting back to you all on this sooner. Here is some feedback for you all to consider.

First, we recognize that TCs have needs like what you are trying to accomplish and we are working on ideas to be able to support it. I hope to be able to share more with you in the near future.

Next, Monica raises the key point for you to keep in mind: "From my knowledge it is fundamental to use those tools for achieving the correct standardisation process, for transparency approach, for managing the IPR issues properly and also for creating persistent URIs ofthe material that will be mentioned later in the standardization process. Otherwise we can have some problems in official steps." -- Simply put, content that you want to incorporate into TC work products, presumably culminating in OASIS Standards must be properly contributed to the TC and must be stored, made available and developed on the OASIS supplied platforms if you are to have the benefits and coverage of the OASIS TC Process and IPR policies.

Having said that, we recognize that there are limitations to the OASIS tools and that a TC may wish to benefit from the work from other sources. In such a circumstance, the *key* action for the TC is that any such work be properly contributed (again, Monica pointed out how LegalDoc and LegalRule have accomplished this) and then incorporated into working draft. When work is properly contributed to the TC, the TC is free to incorporate the work into its deliverables. The important element of contributed work is that there be no limits to the Contributor's ability to make such grants, acknowledgments, or agreements with respect to the contribution as are required by OASIS policy. In other words, the person making the contribution has all the rights necessary to do so.

What does this mean with respect to the github you are discussing so that "...we in the OASIS SC can use as a resource for our work"? It means first of all that, yes, you should keep it completely separate from OASIS and the TC. I.e. it is not an official TC resource, not sanctioned by OASIS, not covered by OASIS rules, etc. It would be alright to say something like "you may also be interested in the work of the OASIS Legal Citation Markup Technical Committee at..." or something like that but otherwise keep it completely separate.

Second, it means that *if* you want to be able to incorporate any of the work being done there into the TC work product, anything contributed into the github must be done in a way that allows for its unimpeded copying and reuse outside the github. Work donated to the github must be done under a license that gives unrestricted rights to its reuse, by the SC or by anyone else. What you absolutely want to avoid is taking something from the github, incorporating it into the TC work product, reaching OASIS Standard and *then* having the original author come back and say "Oh by the way..." And yes - while rare, OASIS has had some instances of after-the-fact awkwardness caused by alledged improper contributions.

The absolute safest way for something from a non-TC/OASIS person to be contributed to the TC is for the author to send it to the legalcitem-comment@lists.oasis-open.org mailing list. That is the purpose of that list and why I am so adamant about its use. That channel is currently the only mechanism we have for ensuring that anything you receive from outside the TC is defensible under our IPR policy. If you see something in the github that you want to incorporate into the TC work product, contact the author and tell them how neat and cool it is and how you'd like to use it and ask if they would send a copy to the -comment@ mailing list.

Alternatively, if you are certain that the work being donated to the github has been done under a permissive license that allows for free and unrestricted reuse, then in theory a TC member could take a copy from the github and contribute it to the TC via the Kavi document archive or the TC mailing list. You are, however, taking on the risk should an objection later be raised.

An alternative approach might be to refer to the github from your spec. For example, if the github contained citation patterns for different jurisdictions, you could make a normative reference to it and say in the spec "patterns that can be used for jurisdictions can be found here..." The potential downside there is that you make your spec depend in part on a resource outside OASIS that can't be guaranteed.

I hope this is helpful in giving you some perspective on the work. My intent isn't to discourage you because I agree completely that Frank is doing great and valuable work here. My intent rather is to make sure you understand the implications for the eventual OASIS Standard so that you can proceed safely.

Please let me know if you have any questions on this. I can invite Jamie Clark to discuss this with us further if you have more questions.

Best regards & Happy New Year!

/chet

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 8:11 AM, monica.palmirani <monica.palmirani@unibo.it> wrote:

Hi Frank,

I sympathize with you! I know the problem because with Akoma Ntoso was the same and with LegalRuleML (and RuleML interconnection) also.

In Akoma Ntoso case: we (Fabio, me, and UN) put the work (schema, documentation, slides, examples) inside of KAVI and SVN as member contributions and so those material was automatically adopted as part of the TC. In this case we adopted the internal contribution.

In LegalRuleML case: a member of RuleML Community made a contribution via external mailing list (https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legalruleml-comment/) to the TC claiming the paternity and the license.
In this case we adopted the external contribution.

You can find the format for claiming the paternity here (annex B):
https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr

So it is important that you have a skype call with Chet as soon as possible also with the participation of the LegalCite chairs in order to find a good solution.

This is my suggestion coming from similar experience, in order to not discover later that we have made a mistake or created a trouble for your work.

Yours,
Monica
Il 20/11/2014 13:46, Frank Bennett ha scritto:

On Thursday, November 20, 2014, monica.palmirani
<monica.palmirani@unibo.it <mailto:monica.palmirani@unibo.it>> wrote:

LegalDocML and LegalRuleML (but also the other OASIS TCs) are using
the OASIS tools for cooperating and for contributing in the TCs.

>From my knowledge it is fundamental to use those tools for
achieving the correct standardisation process, for transparency
approach, for managing the IPR issues properly and also for creating
persistent URIs ofthe material that will be mentioned later in the
standardization process. Otherwise we can have some problems in
official steps.

https://www.oasis-open.org/__resources/tools
<https://www.oasis-open.org/resources/tools>

Chet could help in these cases. Any time that I had some doubts
about contributions, tools, IPR issues I asked to Chet.

In any case we are using (in LegalDocML and LegalRuleML) the
following tools:

- Wiki - https://wiki.oasis-open.org/ (public)

- JIRA - for managing the activities/task/ticket/bugs (not public
only for the OASIS members)
https://issues.oasis-open.org/__secure/Dashboard.jspa
<https://issues.oasis-open.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa>

- SVN repo - for including all the schema, documents, etc.
https://tools.oasis-open.org/__version-control/browse/wsvn/?__sc=1
<https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/?sc=1>
(public)

- KAVI - for the official documents approved by the TC. It is
important to archive the official documents because we need links in
KAVI for each official documents involved in the standardization
process (minutes, working document, CSD). See this document for the
naming convention of the files:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/__specGuidelines/ndr/__namingDirectives.html#tracks
<http://docs.oasis-open.org/specGuidelines/ndr/namingDirectives.html#tracks>

Each document archived in KAVI is public:
https://www.oasis-open.org/__committees/documents.php?wg___abbrev=legaldocml
<https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml>
https://www.oasis-open.org/__committees/documents.php?wg___abbrev=legalruleml
<https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legalruleml>

Each email in the mailing list and the attachment are public:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/__archives/legaldocml/
<https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legaldocml/>

For the public accessibility to the resources/contributions see:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/__specGuidelines/ndr/__namingDirectives.html#__accessibleURIs

<http://docs.oasis-open.org/specGuidelines/ndr/namingDirectives.html#accessibleURIs>

My 2 cents,
Monica

The problem (at least in the case of the courts SC) is one of manpower.
The technical SC decided that controlled lists were preferable to dumb
strings, for values with a finite scope. There are a lot of courts, and
there are a lot of reporters, and there are many more intersections of
the two. To build out the two lists and the relations between them is
beyond the capacity of the committee membership, but there is a
community that can help. Since both the community and OASIS have the
same aim, I don't see any harm in activating the former, to produce
material that can be vetted and adopted by the latter.

Certainly OASIS groups have adopted external work in the past; the only
novelty here is perhaps that the external product was conceived after
the group formed.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes - I'll try to talk to Chet sometime soon,
to iron out any wrinkles.

Frank

Il 19/11/2014 23:09, Frank Bennett ha scritto:

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 6:40 AM, John Quentin Heywood
<heywood@wcl.american.edu> wrote:

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

<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

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

and

http://jqheywood.github.io/__CourtsSC/states.html
<http://jqheywood.github.io/CourtsSC/states.html>

Terrific!

One question: Should I then remove the reference to OASIS from the
header of the online docs?

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

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

That seems stingy, by it would indeed reduce the potential for
people
to take the work-in-progress as some sort of draft standard.

If I read correctly, then, the repo itself can be made public? That
would be great - there are already people out there ready to
contribute to the effort.

Some notes about infrastructure changes in the works chez
CourtsSC ...

For the CourtsSC docs, the next step will be to generate them
directly
from a filesystem data hierarchy of the content (which exists as of
yesterday), with links on each court and reporter to their discrete
source files in the GitHub filesystem. I think GitHub now
automatically performs a fork and pull request when people without
write permissions to an edit, so that will give us easy-access
editing
by outside contributors, and an editorial workflow for maintaining
control over the end product.

For extension and reorganization of the source files through the
GitHub online UI, I'll add an explanation of how that works to a
README displayed on every source page. So that will be covered as
well.

Finally, we'll need to work on validation and output. For that, we
should have a discussion about what the constraints should be
(beyond
producing parseable source and valid XML). Then I can start mucking
around with code.

With validation in place, we'll be ready to tie the whole thing
into TravisCI.

https://travis-ci.org/

Once on-the-fly validation is working, we'll be ready for scalable
crowd-sourcing.

I guess a final item will be the output. The current rendered
view is
handy for examining and working with the source structures, but
machines will want something else. We should be able to generate it
automatically, once we know what it is.

Frank

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

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--
==============================__=====
Associate professor of Legal Informatics
School of Law
Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
C.I.R.S.F.I.D. http://www.cirsfid.unibo.it/
Palazzo Dal Monte Gaudenzi - Via Galliera, 3
I - 40121 BOLOGNA (ITALY)
Tel +39 051 277217
Fax +39 051 260782
E-mail monica.palmirani@unibo.it
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--
===================================
Associate professor of Legal Informatics
School of Law
Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
C.I.R.S.F.I.D. http://www.cirsfid.unibo.it/
Palazzo Dal Monte Gaudenzi - Via Galliera, 3
I - 40121 BOLOGNA (ITALY)
Tel +39 051 277217
Fax +39 051 260782
E-mail monica.palmirani@unibo.it
====================================

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