Straw Poll re delay to consensus report to include MCT

[Robin LaFontaine <robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com>]

I am ready to update WD04 of the report to include comments from Andreas and Thorsten, but I cannot update it with Svante's significant changes because there is a lot of new material that is not supported by background documents and discussion within the group. I was not expecting a complete revision of the document, adding a new proposal for which there is no supporting document: the reference is to the email of 22 Sept 2011 where the last line is "I am currently working on a formal proposal". We do not have this proposal.

We have previously agreed to evaluate the two proposals and produce a report, and this has taken us from April 2011 to now. We had also in our charter that we should take change tracking as our priority (this is a direction of the TC who approved the charter).

It is not acceptable that one proposal has very little supporting documentation and has had no discussion in the SC, where the other proposals have had considerable collaborative work and discussion.

In order to include the MCT proposal there would be work for the SC to do, as we have done for GCT and ECT, including:
1. A document that gives details of the proposal, to reference in the report
2. We need a presentation of this so we can understand it and ask questions about it
3. We need to see worked examples so we can validate that it works
4. Discuss as needed on the email list and in calls

To do this we need to revise our decision to include only those proposals that were presented to us within the original agreed timeframe. If we do revise that decision then we need to check with the TC that we should no longer treat change tracking as a priority, i.e. that we should delay our work to fully consider real-time collaboration.

Such a decision will impact users of ODF who need change tracking as soon as possible.

Please reply to this email with your views on this. Essentially the choice for us as a subcommittee is:

A. Complete the revision of the consensus report covering ECT and GCT with references to collaboration, and include comments from Thorsten and Andreas (plus any smaller changes Svante may propose). We can then discuss MCT while we get public feedback on the report in parallel.

B. Revise our agreement to include only the two proposals ECT and GCT and delay the report (for 2-3 months) to include MCT.

If we go for B then we need to check this with the TC as above.

I hope we can get the views of all SC members on this. We will schedule a call in 1-2 weeks to discuss further but not everyone will be able to attend that.

Robin

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Robin La Fontaine, Director, DeltaXML Ltd  "Experts in information change"
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