Tech committee reboot proposal

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

Okay, here's the proposal for an interim technical committee
process that five people noodled out on Friday.  I'm responsible
for any errors in the details.

BACKGROUND

The OASIS bylaws allow for two kinds of committees:

   committees of the board (art. 5) and

   committees of the membership (art. 13 sect. 8, second para)

Our current committees fall into neither category and therefore
legally don't exist; this is our immediate problem.

Committees of the membership are out because it would be difficult
to get the membership to create them according to any of the
prescribed methods of appointment (Robert's pp. 482-489) and
impossible to get the membership to oversee the composition of the
committee by adding or removing members (p. 487, last para).  Note
that under our existing process, committee membership cannot
change except by resolution of the body that created the
committee.

This leaves committees of the board, which can be of two kinds:
executive committees (art. 5 sect. 1) and advisory committees
(art. 5 sect. 2).  Executive committees are proper subsets of the
board itself and are therefore not appropriate to the construction
of technical specifications.  This leaves advisory committees,
which, like the board, are run by Robert's Rules of Order, Ninth
Edition (art. 5 sect. 3 applied to art. 3 sect. 14).

Under Robert's (p. 488), any committee can appoint subcommittees:

   A committee ... can appoint subcommittees, which are
   responsible to and report to the committee and not to the
   assembly.  Subcommittees must consist of members of the
   committee, except when otherwise authorized by the society in
   cases where the committee is appointed to take action that
   requires the assistance of others.

"Assembly" and "society" refer to the agency that creates the
committee, in this case the board of directors.  The second
sentence of art. 5 sect. 2 of the bylaws states in effect that an
advisory committee can have members that aren't members of the
board, but it doesn't contain a similar clause about its
subcommittees, so I think that the inclusion of nonmembers of an
advisory committee in its subcommittees has to be specifically
licensed by the board, preferably in the resolution that creates
the advisory committee.

THE PROPOSAL

The workprocess list members who met briefly at the UN/OASIS
meeting Friday propose the following interim structure for OASIS
technical committees.

   There shall be two advisory committees of the board.  One of
   these committees shall advise the board regarding process;
   let's call this the Process Advisory Committee.  The other
   committee shall advise the board on technical resolutions to
   be submitted for the approval of the membership; let's call
   this the Technical Resolution Advisory Committee.  [I can't
   remember now what name we came up with Friday; I'm open to
   better suggestions.]

   In creating the advisory committees, the board shall appoint
   certain people from among the active members of this list to
   constitute the PAC, and shall appoint certain people (we can
   start with the chairs of the intended subcommittees) to
   constitute the TRAC.  It shall specifically authorize the TRAC
   to include nonmembers of the TRAC in subcommittees of the
   TRAC.

   The TRAC can then create the technical subcommittees on its
   own initiative and can add or delete members of the
   subcommittees as necessary on a continuing basis to maintain
   proper functioning as specified in Robert's (pp. 487-488).

This structure (credit for which is owed mainly to Eduardo)
removes the burden of maintaining subcommittee membership from the
board.  It doesn't scale to an arbitrary number of subcommittees,
but it will do until we replace the interim process with a new
one, and we think that it's legally bulletproof under our current
bylaws.

In creating the TRAC, the board should establish a standing rule
along the lines we were discussing a few days ago that sets out
the procedure by which the TRAC determines who should initially be
appointed to each subcommittee.  In a subsequent message with the
subject line "Initializing the PAC," I will post a revised version
of the piece of that procedure specifically needed to get the PAC
started.  You should read that procedure in considering whether
you want to be appointed a voting member of the proposed PAC.

SUBCOMMITTEES AND MAILING LISTS

One of the things we discussed on Friday was the need to
accommodate lurkers in subcommittees.  For example, I am a member
of the regrep list, but there's no way I could properly be
considered a member of the regrep committee, and if people like me
were considered to be members, then the regrep committee could
never pass a vote or constitute a quorum.  Nevertheless, as an
OASIS member I want to keep tabs on what the committee is doing
and offer an occasional suggestion.

I think that this can be handled simply by making the members of
each technical subcommittee formally appointed by the TRAC a
subset of the members of the corresponding mailing list and
requiring their email deliberations to take place on that list.
Thus, discussion in each list would proceed pretty much unchanged,
the only major difference being that only the members formally
appointed by the TRAC could vote.  This is of great practical
importance, because it means that the requirements for approval by
mail (a majority of the entire membership of the committee) would
be met despite the number of lurkers on the list.

I believe that a similar mechanism would work in face-to-face
meetings; allow any OASIS member to attend and participate in a
subcommittee meeting, but let only formally appointed members
vote.  This would allow subcommittees to meet the formal
requirements for a quorum.  Based on past experience, I do not
believe that this approach will always work for phone conferences.
However, we can leave attendance by nonmembers in both phone
conferences and face-to-face meetings to the voting members of
each subcommittee, who are clearly authorized by Robert's to
determine the extent to which observers are allowed to participate
(p. 639).

TIMELINE

We need to nail down an interim process as soon as possible.

The people who met Friday agreed that this mail list does not
actually constitute a committee as specified in any way by the
bylaws; it's just a mail list created by authorization of the
board.  So our first job will be to bootstrap the PAC from this
list.  To that end, we invite your consideration of the proposal
above as something that we intend to submit to the board shortly.
I will incorporate any sensible suggestions received by Tuesday
evening (24 November) into the version submitted to the board.

Jon