Re: Default Process: Other Committees

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

Jon wrote:
| (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?)

There is so little said that one can only assume that subcommittees
are committees, appointed by committees.  This opens up interesting
vistas of recursion, and as the society may authorize committees
to include nonmembers of the committee in the membership of subcommittees,
if enough recursion occurred, subcommittees could eventually drift
away entirely (in membership, not authority) from the original
committee.  Unlimited recursion, of course, is in the spirit of XML,
which allows no exclusion exceptions ...

...

| 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?

Jon's data mining seems to have produced a pretty clear picture; I do
recall that we've had some sort of plenary meeting before breaking
up into individual TCs (as at Aztec One in San Jose last year); whether
that's formally a plenary of an overarching TC or not, I think it may
have value.

| | 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.

The board has to be able to appoint committees - such as a committee
to consider changes to the bylaws.  In fact, the bylaws look as though 
they were designed to support just such committees.  Whether TCs 
should be governed by the same language is another matter.

regards, Terry