Re: Kavi meeting with the UBL chairs

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@sun.com>]

Karl,

I'm including the ubl-csc chairs list this time in order to cut
down a bit on the delay caused by having me in the loop.  Internal
Sun demands on my time have made my ordinarily lacklustre
responsiveness much worse recently.

| We would be happy to talk with you and the UBL SC chairs about any
| problems you are having with Kavi. Unfortunately, you've picked a
| time that's right on top of our weekly staff meeting. Could you
| make this 24 hours earlier or later?

(Karl is responding to my suggestion that we meet Thursay 17 April
at 8 a.m. California time to discuss Kavi technical issues.)

I'm despairing of finding a time when we can get together for a
one-hour call.  Our problem is that the 8 a.m. slot is already
taken on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Perhaps we can work
out something together in this thread.  Remember that we have
subcommittee chairs in both Europe and Australia, so our options
are pretty limited.

| Also, I asked you a week ago to send us specifics on any problems
| that you were having so that we could look into them. As far as I
| know we haven't heard back from you. It's difficult to look into
| solutions for problems unless we know what to look for. If you
| could give us details in advance of the meeting then we could be
| better prepared to have answers for you.

Anne Hendry got back to me earlier this week with some comments
that I am only now catching up with.  I append these below.

I'll note up front that some of the problems relating to the way
memberships were handled were caused by my failure to get you
information you asked for prior to the transition.  I'm leaving
these comments in to keep Anne's input intact, but everyone should
understand that I am responsible for a lot of what went wrong with
this.

I think the rest of what Anne has to say speaks for itself.  My
take on all this is that about 80 percent of the problems could be
solved simply by trusting a few of us with ftp access to part of
the web site.  The previous system limited our access to the ubl
portion of the site and allowed us to work very flexibly within
that limitation.  This is starting to look to me like a hugely
difficult set of problems that could be solved with a single
judicious policy decision.

I don't think it's necessary to respond in detail to the comments
below (particulary since some of those responses would be just a
tidge embarrassing to Yours Truly); they are provided for
background.  Also, I suspect that some of the link problems may
have already been fixed over the last few days; we've all noticed
the work you guys have been doing to address these specific
problems.  I think it would be better to find *some* acceptable
time for a phone call so that we could get a whole lot of stuff
out of the way fairly quickly and discuss the real problem, which
is that making everything go through a mechanical interface isn't
allowing us to operate effectively.

Jon

==================================================================

Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 20:17:42 -0700
From: Anne Hendry <anne.hendry@sun.com>
To: jon.bosak@sun.com, anne.hendry@sun.com
Subject: Re: [ubl-csc] Need URL examples

Hi Jon,

I've spent some time this afternoon with Kavi.
I've tried to avoid getting too close before now,
so this is my first finer look at how the system
operates.  Therefore, some of these reactions are
not link-specific, but more generic issues.

Kavi issues

General
-------

1.
The problem begins with the fact that Kavi makes it difficult
to disseminate the information on the daily activity of the
TC to the general public.  We want our work to be open to
the general public to view.  Kavi requires a password to
view the contents of the group pages.  If we use those
group pages as they were intended (as repositories for
documents, calendar info, etc) then we make that information
inaccessible to the public.  This is against the nature of
the standards process. The standards process is an *open*
process.  At least people certainly have been used to OASIS
operating that way.  If we now require passwords in order
for people to view the work of the TCs, that is a significant
change in policy which I'm not sure will be very well received.
I think this is the single most important problem with the current
implementation.  Why do we need a password to get to TC information?
Why is this information now restricted?  This is a serious
collaboration inhibitor.  The driving factor appears to be
revenue for OASIS, but this could backfire.

2.
The inability to place documents in a static area of the web
site is essential for maintaining continuity of information,
particularly if that information only changes infrequently
(eg. UBL Events Calendar).  There are currently 2 problems,
one which is mentioned above in terms of not having public
access to all information on the web site, but even if that is
solved, the current document areas only show the last couple
of documents or just the day's email messages.  How do I
easily get yesterday's or the day before or the week before
to find a document that hasn't changed since it was posted?
It seems I would need to go back out and use the public lists,
if it was in an email, but if it was not in email, we don't have
the ability to easily retrieve it, that I can see.  We need a web
site area where we can place and periodically update information
that is not appropriate to send in email and requires more
continuity/availability than an email message or document
that quickly scrolls out of site.  This is one of the features
that was provided by the OASIS server disk space and ftp access,
and is still needed.

3.
We require a 'work area' that is semi-invisible and can be
organized and reorganized without too much concern, but
provides the ability to store/share documents.  Kavi
imposes structure, but the structure is too flat and
also too time-sensitive to provide this feature.
The OASIS server was being used as such a disk repository,
with ftp access giving the ability for manipulation
(although limited) of files.  We had a many levels of
directories to organize the content.  We lack this in
Kavi - to my knowledge there is no way to build a heirarchy
of information within the Kavi structure.  It's unclear
to me why the ftp and disk access is being removed, and
there is no viable alternative provided.  Two examples
of the use we had for ftp to the OASIS site are:
  a) the lcsc 'working area' where we had many documents
     in various forms of finalization that could be
     accessed easily by the chairs and editors and
     provided a backing store that could be easily
     manipulated; they were all accessible at once
     in one place.  We no longer have that in Kavi.
  b) I was storing our comments on disk on the OASIS server.
     This was working very well, and helped to keep things
     organized.  What does Kavi offer to replace this?
     How can I get that functionality back?  I am now
     storing this info on my system at home.  This is
     not a good idea (no backups!)  I would like disk
     space again.

4.
Kavi places all email/docs/rep lists/etc from all subsc's
in one list.  This is not practical - I need to be able to
sort the mail and other info by SC and SubSC.  I just looked
at the 'customization' page.  This is too much overhead.
It was just fine to go to the mail list link and look at
things 'by date' or  'by thread', or whatever, and be able
to do a search otherwise.  Where are those features?

5.
I noticed that our minutes html document has a broken gif.
How do we place html files in Kavi so that all their
images, etc go along with them?

6.
There seems to be information missing.  For instance,
the membership list of the ebXML IIC contains only 2 people.
Perhaps this is because only two of the people on the
alias have formal OASIS membership.  However, if that
is the reason there are only two people listed, this
is a brutal way to transition people who are volunteering
their time on these efforts.

7.
People are still not getting email.  Please check to
see if robert.shanbaum@gerbercoburn.com is on the UBL TC
and UBL LSC lists, and if not,let me know what needs to be
done to add him.  It's not reasonable to take the membership
of such a large organization and expect everyone to drop
what they are doing to fix these problems.  This should
have been scoped out before-hand and all requirements
communicated.  The original email aliases were available
and could have been mapped against the OASIS membership
list *before* the rollout. Then a staged roll-out would
have been appropriate so people (chairs) could have been
walked through the changes.  It's still not too late to do this,
since there are still many changes to be made to the system,
and still email list discrepancies.  This should be done in
one operation now for all the tcs.  [I suspect that this issue
belongs to me almost entirely -- Jon]

8.
Search is not scoped in a way as to be useful.  I can search
all groups or one group, but not the groups I belong to.
Some of the things on my home page relate to my groups
(documents, mail, etc) and some relate to all of OASIS
(company members, search, etc).  I don't see any capability
to search for individual items (documents, etc). or to
limit the scope to a set of dates.  Perhaps I don't see
this and it's there somewhere.

9.
Communication of the benefits would be helpful here.
I don't recall seeing any notification on the OASIS
site that there would be a transition and for the
general public, who may have come to visit over the
past month, to understand what is happening and why.
There's nothing there now to ease the uncertainty
of people who are going to the site and finding
everything changed and a lot broken.

10.
The one feature I've found slightly useful is the calendar,
but I think I could get a calendar for less headache.


Specific link problems
----------------------

1.
If I follow a link to http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/lsc/,
then click on a link from that page to another (old-style) link
within OASIS (eg. http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/) I am
redirected to
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl
and can no longer use the 'Back' button to get to the page(s)
I came from ('Back' simply puts me in a continuous a redirect
'loop' over and over back to
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl.

2.
I have a lot of bookmarks (and I'm sure I'm not the only one)
to the tc pages.  These are some where I get errors:

a.
   http://oasis-open.org/committees/archives/ubl-lcsc/
   http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/msc/200204/ Not Found
   http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/lsc/200204/industry.pdf Blank page

b.
   From a January email to lcsc from Tim:
   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-lcsc/200301/msg00010.html
   gets you to http://lists.oasis-open.org/css/top.css and 'Not Found'.
   and then if I hit the 'Back' button after that I get 'Network Error:
   connection refused', and can't go back.
c.
   From http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-lcsc/ click on the
   200301 (January 2003) 'by date' link.  You get the same problem
   as above:
   gets you to http://lists.oasis-open.org/css/top.css and 'Not Found'.
   and then if I hit the 'Back' button after that I get 'Network Error:
   connection refused', and can't go back.
d.
   After this, no matter what link I click on that lists page I
   get the same error.  I think it kills the server.  As a matter
   of fact, at this point, if I go all the way back up to
   http://lists.oasis-open.org/ and choose *any* of the tc lists,
   then try to view any of the list by clicking on any of the 'by *'
   links, I get the same error.  I do think if the server is not dead
   now at least it is not answering requests.  Kavi appears brittle.

So I've spent just a little over an hour now and have found these
problems.  I only had to go through 10 of my old email messages to
get this many issues.  I believe it should be up to OASIS to test
this software and do a proper staging before rolling it out into
a production system.  I wonder if any requirements-gathering was
done, because the issue of public access to the TC work seems
fundamental, and not to have been considered in the choice of
how to roll out this software.  I think it's possible the
software may be able to be configured to provide global
access, but I haven't heard of this being tried out.

It certainly needs more off-line testing.

-Anne

==================================================================

Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:15:22 -0700
From: Anne Hendry <anne.hendry@sun.com>
To: jon.bosak@sun.com
CC: anne.hendry@sun.com
Subject: more kavi issues

1.