OASIS members,
Yesterday, at the OASIS Member Meeting held in conjunction with the Borderless Cyber event in New York City, I had the pleasure of announcing the newly reorganized and streamlined OASIS TC Process. This new process will go into effect on July 1st. Today, I am delighted to share the details with all of you.
The Board Process Committee has been hard at work on these improvements for over a year. We had several objectives:
- To simplify - make the rules less verbose, imposing, and complicated while retaining our essential rules & values;
- To weed out – move "how" details into supporting documents and focus the rules on the "what;"
- To re-organize – extract content that applies to all OASIS activities into their own documents and let the TC Process focus on the rules that apply to specifically to the work of Technical Committees;
- To support – set up our policies so that they also work smoothly with other initiatives such as OASIS Open Repositories and our coming open source project program.
The results are in the attached zip file. Both Open Office and MS Office formats are provided. (These are in word processing formats for now but of course the official versions will be published in HTML on the OASIS web site.)
The zip file contains:
- The streamlined TC Process, trimmed down to focus on the content that applies specifically to running Technical Committees and to advancing work through the OASIS process. A red-lined copy is included so that you can review the changes in detail;
- The new OASIS Defined Terms document, collecting all the defined terms that apply to OASIS policies into one common source, also with a red-lined version; and
- The new OASIS Committee Operations Process, documenting rules that apply to the work of any committee.
Our aim was to keep the rules unchanged however we did make one improvement. That exception? It is a pretty big one. The way OASIS Standards are approved is about to change.
Why? Because the current balloting period is a fingernail-biting exercise for TCs. It motivates them to field 'get out the vote' efforts, increasing the volume of emails to other TCs and OASIS Primary Representatives, and, most importantly, it does little, as far as we could see from five years worth of ballot results, to improve the quality of final work.
Instead, OASIS is moving to a call for consent/objections model. OS votes will start from the assumption that the experts know their stuff and that other Members respect that. A ballot will be posted but the assumption will be that the Candidate OASIS Standard will become an OASIS Standard *unless* organizational members have reason to object.
So if the Candidate OASIS Standard receives no votes at all or only affirmative votes, it will become an OASIS Standard. If valid objections are entered by 15 or more organizational members, then the call will fail. If objections less than 15 are made, the TC will have options for proceeding with objection handling and the opportunity for a second call for consent. Section 2.8.3 Call for consent for OASIS Standard has all the details.
We believe this shift will reduce both the stress and the email traffic associated with the current balloting process, while bringing forward meaningful feedback on the rare occasion where there may be reason to do so.
Please feel free to share share your reactions and feedback including sending comments to the
oasis-board-comment@lists.oasis-open.org mailing list if you wish. We are collecting all feedback and will be reviewing it and taking action in the months ahead.
Best regards,
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/chet
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Chet Ensign
Director of Standards Development and TC Administration
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
http://www.oasis-open.orgPrimary: +1 973-996-2298
Mobile: +1 201-341-1393