Re: Default Process: Other Committees

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

[Tommie Usdin:]

| This brings to mind 2 issues:
| 
|     1.  What is a committee (as opposed to a sub-committee), and
|     2.  The "advisory" label and mission of the committees.
| 
| 1. Committee versus subcommittee:
| 
| This is probably the origin of confusion about what is a
| committee and what a subcommittee.  If, as many have
| assumed, there is an OASIS Technical Committee and an OASIS
| Marketing Committee, then the technical work has been done
| by subcommittees of the Technical Committee.  But sometimes
| these have been discussed as if they were committees
| (e.g. "The Tables Committee" and "The Conformance
| Committee").
| 
| While it sounds trivial, the difference may be critical in
| areas of scheduling and control.  If there is one Technical
| Committee with multiple subcommittees the real work is one
| organizational level below where I believe it should be, and
| the chair of the Technical Committee has inappropriate
| burdens and responsibilities.

(Robert's appears to have very little to say about subcommittees
(p. 488); apparently they operate under the same rules as committees.
There have to be some implied differences about how they are
appointed, since the motion to commit would be carried out under
committee rules of order, but I'm not seeing right away that this
difference amounts to much.  Does anyone find anything here that I'm
missing?)

Tommie asks: Are our existing technical committees really
subcommittees?  Interesting question.

Hmm... (doing a little data mining...)

This doesn't appear to be the structure we historically had in mind;
the original press release (14 April 1993) says

   On the technical side, the first priority of the new group
   will be to articulate a clear definition of SGML, said
   Haviland Wright, chief technologist for SGML Open and
   president of Avalanche Development Company.

   SGML Open will establish a set of technical committees to
   handle these and other interoperability issues. Additional
   goals for the next 12 months include providing guidelines to
   proposal writers for specifying SGML systems and agreeing on
   vendor-neutral ways of interchanging text files, graphics,
   video, and other constituent parts of compound documents.

In a mail posted to the Davenport list 5 October 1993, Paul Grosso
said:

   i've only been able to skim this conversation so far, but i'd
   like to pick up on steve's comment about SGML Open.  as chief
   technical officer of SGML Open, i have already had a couple
   comments about the possibility of adding to our technical
   agenda an issue about industry-wide conventions to assist the
   resolution of external references, be they links, id/idref,
   FPIs, etc.  if the davenport group were to come up with a
   statement summarizing the issues--perhaps including an outline
   of a suggested solution that would address the problems--and
   submit it to sgml open (c/o me), i would work toward convening
   an sgml open technical committee that could work for a
   consortium-wide agreement in this important area.

I guess we didn't get around to that, but the reference to "an sgml
open technical committee" suggests more than one.  In a message sent
15 February 1994, Paul said:

   SGML Open will be having technical committee meetings Friday
   Feb 25 in LA (the end of the week of Documation).  I'd like to
   have a meeting of the character set issues committee, the
   committee on SGML Database interfaces/SGML query languages,
   the table interchange committee, and the entity management
   committee.

   I have sent separate messages to those people who expressed an
   interest in these topics.  This general message, sent to all
   those who signed up at our morning Technical Track meeting in
   Boston on 93 Dec 10, is a summary to invite participation from
   all SGML Open members who plan to be in LA on February 25.

   The entity management committee and character set issues
   committee met in Boston December 10; February 25th would be
   the initial meetings for the SGML Database interfaces/SGML
   query languages committee and the table interchange committee.

I see also a set of minutes dated 1 March 1994 from Wayne Wohler
reporting on a meeting of "the SGML Open Character Set Committee" held
in Los Angeles 25 February 1994.  And I distantly remember other
sitting through a couple of meetings on this subject, so we must have
kept going for a while.

Unless someone can dig out evidence to the contrary (go for it), I
believe that we've always had multiple technical committees, not
subcommittees, loosely organized into a technical track, not a
Technical Committee.  But Paul Grosso's on this list, so I'll just ask
him -- does that accord with your recollection, Paul?

| 2.  Advisory
| 
| I started to say that I don't like the sound of this at
| all. It implies that committees serve the Board not the
| membership, and that the Board should accept or decline any
| advice from the committees.  Thus, it would be Board who
| look at the work product of a committee and decide if it
| should be promulgated by OASIS or not.

Right, but remember that under art. 3 sect. 2, the board ordinarily
does make all the decisions of oasis as a corporation.  Nothing that's
been suggested so far would change this (and I sense a depth of legal
quicksand in this area that would make me very nervous about treading
there).

| After a little thought, it seems to me that the Board should
| certainly be allowed to form committees as envisioned by
| this paragraph.  That is, parts of the Board, perhaps with a
| few additional people, who help the Board do something
| within the scope of the Board.  Perhaps these should be
| called Committees of the Board.

I agree.  I wasn't suggesting changing any part of art. 5 sect. 2
except the part that makes us label committees of the board "advisory
committees."

But now that you mention it, since all the implementation changes are
additions to the existing bylaws, if they were all put into a new
article then the existing article 5 could just be left the way it is,
couldn't it?  I don't see any harm in allowing the board to appoint
advisory committees.  That's no doubt how the couple of sections
relating to "other committees of the board" got into the bylaws in the
first place.

| In contrast, perhaps, we should also describe Committees of
| the Membership.  I would like to see a statement that says
| that Committees of the Membership are key to the functioning
| of OASIS. Such committees will be formed of the membership,
| authorized by the Board, and will submit their workproduct
| to the membership for approval.  Rather than saying that
| members don't have to be members of the Board I'd rather
| specify that the committee chair must be a member of OASIS,
| and then discuss who the other members may be (and perhaps
| they don't have to be members of OASIS).

We've already got committees of the membership any time we want them.
See art. 13 sect. 8, second paragraph, and Robert's pp. 165-176.  But
the machinery of entertaining a motion to commit among the membership
at large is too unwieldy for email (I think), and (interesting as such
a scenario might be!) we don't often have the quorum we would need to
conduct such business as an assembly.  If we did, then such a
committee wouldn't need authorization from the board, though given
art. 3 sect. 2 it's hard to see quite what it would do right off the
bat.  But since we don't, what we've got in practice (article 5) are
committees of the board.

But gosh, this sure goes a long way out on a logical limb.  Does
anyone remember whether our technical committees were created by
action of the board, or by action of the membership acting in
assembly?  The latter is at least theoretically possible and probably
ought to be checked by someone who was closer to setting this up.  I
can't remember whether this all went by us during an actual meeting;
I suppose it could have.

Jon