workprocess - changes comments

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

Just a few items, but ones I didn't bring up before.

| PROPOSED CHANGES TO THE DEFAULT PROCESS

| 1999.11.01

| There's no denying that amending the Bylaws is a certain amount of
| trouble, but we are going to have to amend the Bylaws anyway to no
| longer be in flagrant violation of Art. 5 Sect. 2, which mandates the
| appearance of the word "advisory" in the name of every OASIS
| committee.  We customarily don't put "advisory" in the names of
| technical committees, and I think that practice over the last several
| years indicates that we don't want to.  So there's no avoiding a
| change to the Bylaws in any case, and such change can conveniently
| accompany other changes to the Bylaws already under consideration by
| the Board of Directors.

Agreed.  BTW, it would be nice if the Board gave notice of changes it's
considering, as some members might have comments on them.  

| In general, I don't think that we should be afraid of proposing
| amendments to the Bylaws if that's what it takes to operate
| effectively.  As OASIS members, we can change the Bylaws directly at
| any members' meeting or more practically through a mail ballot.  If I
| have correctly interpreted the provisions of Article 9 and of Sections
| 5, 6, and 9 of Article 13 of the Bylaws, changing the Bylaws by means
| of a mail ballot is not all that hard if the changes are
| uncontroversial.  Only one-third of the voting members have to return
| a ballot, and only a majority of those voting have to approve the
| changes.  We can do this.

Yes.  Which members get to vote?  The Bylaws don't separate the
sheep from the goats in this regard, and the OASIS page on benefits of
membership talks about voting for Directors and TRs only.

| The minimum changes that I think we need to make to realize the
| technical committees described in the process outline are as follows:
|
|    1. Remove the requirement that OASIS committees have to
|       have the word "advisory" in their names.  That this will
|       require a change to the OASIS Bylaws (Art. 5 Sect. 2) seems
|       to me to be beyond question.
| 
|    2. Replace the default rules for appointment of members
|       (Robert's pp. 482-487) with a different set of rules
|       designed for committees whose formation is nearly
|       autonomous and whose membership is allowed to change
|       without approval from outside the committee.  This
|       involves, among other things, definition of a voting member
|       (as opposed to someone who just drops in from time to
|       time), rules for maintaining voting membership, and
|       procedures for the termination and reinstatement of voting
|       status.  These new rules for participation represent a
|       basic change in the relationship between a board and its
|       committees expressed in Robert's, where the members of each
|       committee are individually appointed by election or by an
|       action of the board, and by the current OASIS Bylaws, which
|       state that all OASIS committees are advisory to the board.
|       I believe that a change of this magnitude will require
|       modification of Article 5 of the Bylaws.

Yes.

|    3. Explicitly allow committees to entertain the motion called
|       Previous Question, perhaps with the threshold for passage
|       raised to two-thirds of the total voting membership of the
|       committee rather than two-thirds of those voting.  Allowing
|       committees to close debate directly contradicts the rules
|       for committees in Robert's and will therefore, I believe,
|       require modification of Article 5 of the Bylaws.

Thinking about this Friday afternoon, I asked myself, "how is 
debate controlled in committees today?" and thought the answer
was "by the chair".  Do we need to allow committees to vote on
closing debate at all?  (The answer would require reading Robert's,
and football is about to commence ....)

>From here on, I want to discuss aims and overall organization
first, then consider details of a solution.

|    4. Define a process for approving a Committee Specification
...
|    5. Make explicit the scalability of the process in Robert's
...
|    6. Provide committee rules specially adapted to the
|       construction and approval of working drafts.  This can be

What is the difference between a draft and a working draft?

|       accomplished on a case-by-case basis in each committee
|       through the establishment (for example) of editorial teams
|       implemented as subcommittees of each committee, with the
|       report of a subcommittee being its working draft, but we
|       may want different rules than Robert's provides for
|       subcommittee reports, and we certainly want to provide
|       uniformity of procedure in the editorial work of the
|       committees.  The specification of such procedures doesn't
|       seem on first consideration to be likely to involve a
|       direct contradiction of Robert's, and we therefore have
|       reason to hope that it could be implemented through a
|       standing order of the board.

Let's get the whole thing in the Bylaws, as long as we have to
touch them anyway.

regards, Terry