Summary of 3-14-06 teleconference

["John M. Greacen" <john@greacen.net>]

This is a summary of the Technical Committee meeting held on Tuesday, March 14, 2006.

 

Persons present:

 

Michael Alexandrou

Jeff Barlow

Jim Beard

Don Bergeron

Terrie Bousquin

Jim Cabral

Tom Carlson

James Cusick

Shane Durham

David Goodwin

John Greacen

Brian Hickman

Christoph Hoashi-Erhardt

George Knecht

Mark Ladd

Laurance Leff

Rex McElrath

John Messing

Robert O’Brien

Nick Pope

Dallas Powell

Michael Robinson

Christopher Smith

 

John Greacen reported on his meeting with the IT staff of the Maricopa County Clerk of Court’s Office.  The Clerk of Court will implement ECF 3.0 as part of its current electronic filing development effort, and will aggressively pursue the implementation effort.  The court has a multiple vendor model, working with CourtLink, eFiling.com, and Wiznet, which makes it an ideal setting for one of our initial implementations. The Clerk of Court has requested technical help from the TC in implementing the specification.

 

Tom Clarke and John Greacen recommend that the TC abandon the use of the terms “reference implementation” and “open source reference implementation.”  OASIS specifications must be implemented by multiple TC members before they can be submitted for approval by the OASIS membership.  The new COSCA/NACM Joint Technology Committee standards approval process will also require interoperability testing.  But none of those implementations needs to have, or should have, a favored status as the official implementation of an OASIS specification.  This recommendation was approved by the members present.

 

John Greacen stated that he believes the TC should nonetheless press Maricopa County to implement ECF 3.0 in as robust a fashion as possible to maximize the use of its implementation for interoperability testing.  We should urge the court to implement eService as a court-supported function and to provide a court-supported filing portal as well as vendor-supported eFiling interfaces.

 

The LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee is currently voting on a proposal to provide our technical committee with $8,000 to engage the services of MTG to provide technical consulting to implementers of ECF 3.0 – particularly Maricopa County.  John Greacen will post a message to the TC list asking if other implementers want to avail themselves of consulting services.

 

The members present approved the Signatures Subcommittee charter submitted by John Messing, with the understanding that the subcommittee will take action only through the full technical committee.

 

The members present agreed to postpone posting ECF 3.0 for comment within OASIS until the 3.01 version has been approved.  Christoph Hoashi-Erhardt has obtained materials from Tom Clarke and Scott Came to use in modifying the specification to incorporate the nomenclature used by the OASIS SOA reference model TC.  Tom Carlson reported that he will get a list of elements whose definitions need to be modified to eliminate data type information to Christoph this week.  With that information, Christoph should be able to post a proposed 3.01 release soon.

 

Tom Carlson plans to complete his review of all of the definitions – for submission to the XSTF – by the end of March.

 

Christopher Smith reported that the subcommittee working with Roger Winters on the summary for judges and administrators will post a revised work product this week.

 

John Greacen reported that the TC now has appellate data elements from the AO USC, from the Arizona Supreme Court, and from the Georgia Supreme Court.  We are waiting for additional submissions from the Arizona Court of Appeals and from the Florida Supreme Court.  John Greacen asked the TC to begin thinking about the process to be followed to develop the ECF 3.1 release that will include enhanced appellate court functionality.  Should we appoint a small group of domain and technical experts – like those used in developing ECF 3.0?  Rex McElrath reported that Georgia does not consider it necessary to have the ECF 3.1 release before implementing the specification for electronic filing in the Georgia Supreme Court.  Terrie Bousquin reported that the NCSC is hosting a meeting on appellate court automation in Tampa this month and will solicit additional input.

 

John Messing reported that the Executive Office of Immigration Review within the US Department of Justice would be a good source for identifying any additional data elements needed to support administrative agency electronic filings.

 

John Greacen will ask Robin Gibson to post hotel and other information for the May TC face to face meeting, which will be held in conjunction with the OASIS annual symposium.  Thanks to Christopher Smith, we will meet at the California Administrative Office of the Courts rather than in the OASIS symposium hotel to reduce member costs in attending.

 

Actions reported in this summary will become the actions of the full technical committee unless objection is received within one week of the submission of this message to the TC list.

 

John M. Greacen

Greacen Associates, LLC

HCR 78 Box 23

Regina, New Mexico 87046

505-289-2164

505-289-2163 (fax)

505-780-1450 (cell)

john@greacen.net