Please read the email below from Roger Winters.
Roger has been one of the TC members of longest standing. We
will miss his contributions and him personally. The way that we can best honor
Roger in the future will be to continue to pay attention to his most constant issue
and concern – one that is reflected eloquently once again in this farewell
email – that our documents need to be accessible and understandable to court
lay people.
I ask Robin Gibson to initiate a nomination and election process
to select a successor to Roger as our TC’s representative on the LegalXML
Member Section Steering Committee. I originally used “replace” in the previous
sentence but realized its inappropriateness; no one will every replace Roger
Winters.
From:
rwinterswa@gmail.com [mailto:rwinterswa@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Roger
Winters
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 11:20 AM
To: john@greacen.net
Subject: Changes
Dear John:
I am writing you in your role as Chair of the Electronic Court Filing Technical
Committee. With regret, I must resign as Editor, as Steering Committee
Representative for the technical committee, and as co-chair of the Documents
Subcommittee. It has been an honor to serve in those capacities.
I recently reached the decision to retire from King County. Why? Because I
realized I could! I have always carried a very full plate of activities, in my
job, in related work (like OASIS LegalXML and ARMA), and in my community. It
has been increasingly difficult to give myself fully to my work in all those
areas. For all too long, I have lacked time and energy for important personal
priorities.
I want to say that, as Editor, I reviewed nearly all of version 4.0 of the
technical committee's specification. I found it to be a well-written piece and
I congratulate Jim Cabral and the technical committee for its overall quality.
I did not have the opportunity to discuss the document with Adam Angione, as we
had hoped, so I leave it to him to add his comments and suggestions
independently. For me, 4.0 gets a "Do Pass" recommendation with one
caution: I continue to find it difficult to relate the specification directly
to the work of court clerks or administrators who may not have much experience
with such technical material. I think there are a couple of ongoing challenges:
to promote a "generalist's" understanding of the technical standards,
and to help court leaders visualize how the standards will help them to develop
their own systems more successfully. I recommend a strong cross-reference to
the "Standards for Electronic Filing Processes (Technical and Business
Approaches)," for its excellent introduction to the subject (at least
through page 47). The outreach on which the technical committee plans to work
this year is very important to keep momentum going.
The technical committee may now wish to reconsider its plan to meet in Seattle
in August. You might contact Superior Court Clerk Barbara Miner (barbara.miner@kingcounty.gov)
about King County's plan for an electronic court records conference at
approximately that time. Do not count on my being involved; it is too soon for
me to know.
Regarding my goals relating to the Court Documents Subcommittee, I came to feel
it would take more time and energy than I could give it even if I were to
remain on the job for another two years. A great deal can be done by showing
how to use existing standards and metadata to bring some level of automation to
the "Clerk Review" process. The potential for most court savings may
lie here, given that a great many courts have not been able to let go of
keeping paper records when introducing electronic filing and document imaging.
I believe there is potential for much more efficiency from initiatives that
preserve and use the digital qualities of court documents that are destroyed by
printing them or that are left unused when treating them as
"electronic" papers. I think Rex McElrath understands what I hoped to
foster by co-chairing that subcommittee and I encourage the technical committee
to encourage his efforts to give more attention to the court document as a data
container as well as a record.
After an adjustment period, I expect to involve myself again in work about
which I care the most. That could include OASIS and LegalXML. For now, I'm
drawing no conclusions. I am re-booting myself (so to speak) and I will
discover what I want to do next. I would like to share what I have learned from
my 20 years with court records, paper and electronic, but I do not yet know how
that might happen. I am glad to have the opportunity to reconsider
possibilities. I feel I still have much to do; I do not intend to be invisible.
Please convey my warm regards to the technical committee and feel free to share
this e-mail as you see fit. My contact information is below and I welcome my
friends and former colleagues to be in touch whenever they will.
Very truly yours,
Roger
Roger Winters
601 S. Washington St. #309
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 755-2526
rwinters@seanet.com