Fast track, slow track

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

We have both immediate and long-term needs in the workprocess effort.

The long-term need is to state a process for the construction of an
unlimited number of XML specifications.  You've already seen the
outline for a process that was worked on and blessed by the OASIS
board; our long-term task is to realize the structure sketched by the
outline (modulo changes we need to introduce in order to make
something that actually works, to be approved implicitly or explicitly
by the board when we're done).  Among the first steps in that process
are the determination of some basic design issues relating to
committee procedure that are necessary to discuss and are possibly
contentious but are not, I think, deeply dependent on other basic
structural features or on each other to the extent that they can't be
talked about and decided upon in parallel.

Among these design issues are the following:

      000. Need for a new set of procedures

	   001. Why Robert's won't work

	   002. Why IETF rules won't work, either

      010. Voting membership in a committee

      020. Limiting debate

	  [021. Rules of discourse in general]

	   025. Previous Question

      030. Notification

      040. Public vs. private

      050. Standing committees

	   055. Maintenance commmittees

      060. Other committees

	   061. Joint subcommittees
	   062. Charter committees
	   063. Industry harmonization committees
	   064. Coordination committees
	   065. Translation committees

      080. Can we call the last step a "standard"?

      090. Shall we require agendas in advance of committee meetings?

I propose that we talk about these issues for a while and then start
up a new set later on when we get done with this list.  I will be
posting messages on issues 001 and 002 shortly, with, I hope, something
on 010 not far behind.

Along with all this design, however, we have a more immediate problem.
If my analysis of our current process is correct (and I would love to
be proven wrong about this), then our committees are not conducting
business legally, because they either haven't been properly created by
the board (since it didn't meet a basic requirement by specifically
naming the members of the committee) or are are not following Robert's
voting procedures (because if the members are simply people who signed
up on mail lists then they are not conducting business with a quorum
when they meet in person and are probably not getting enough response
in email to meet the even stronger requirement there -- an email vote
requires a majority of all the members, whereas a meeting in person
requires a majority of a quorum, which can mathematically be just a
little above 25 percent of the members).

I am posting a separate message on what I think we could do about
this.

Jon