Miscellaneous (Was: Re: Initializing the PAC)

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

[robin@isogen.com:]

| Recognizing that face-to-face meetings are optimal for
| getting work done (especially for solving complex problems)
| -- it's good to know that OASIS/XML.org committees won't be
| required to have four F2F meetings annually.

Yes.  I'm convinced that phone meetings are procedurally equivalent to
F2F meetings.  It shouldn't be necessary for a committee ever to meet
in person.

| Phone conferences seem a good option if access (800/888
| numbers, sufficient lines, congenial times) is guaranteed,
| but the phone forum has (obviously) some of the same (old)
| limitations as the F2F meeting in a room.

And then some.  Given the practical limits on the number of active
participants in a phone conference, committees may (for practical
reasons) have to exercise their prerogative under Robert's to exclude
observers if their number exceeds what can be accommodated in this
format.

| A broader question is whether the committee charters can
| specify operational frameworks within which a lot of the
| hard work is to be done outside the context of a "convened
| committee meeting, with quorum rules, formal motions,
| seconds, voting, etc."  Of course, there's a place for this
| formality when needed: how much of the time is it actually
| needed?

I've become convinced that it's not the formality that's the problem
but rather the overhead of keeping track of it.  I think that there
are some things that can be done to alleviate the burden of tracking
procedure, but this isn't the time to be discussing that.

One thing that I think people involved in XML work have largely lost
track of is the power given to any committee to form subcommittees in
order to decompose the task into manageable pieces.  I will propose
later on that we strongly encourage TCs to form subcommittees composed
of people who live close to each other to meet in person.  I believe
that this could solve a lot of problems.

| I would try to exploit our modern technologies, which
| 'Roberts' probably didn't anticipate. For example, a
| "meeting" declared to last for one week, to be conducted
| entirely via email, and where all current members agree in
| advance to give their proxy vote to the [chair | vice
| president] if they fail to communicate a required "vote" by
| the end of the specified period.  Etc.

Getting this set up and the proxies sorted out would probably take a
whole meeting cycle.  Besides, I agree with Robert's on this (I quote
from the 1915 edition):

   Proxy voting ... is unknown to a strictly deliberative
   assembly, and is in conflict with the idea of the equality of
   members, which is a fundamental principle of deliberative
   assemblies.  There can be but little use for debate where one
   member has more votes than another, possibly more than all the
   others combined.

| People *do* take three-week vacations sometimes, so the
| machinery should be set up (1) so as not to put a person in
| membership jeopardy if s/he is unavailable for a couple
| meetings, and (2) so as not to hamstring the operation of
| the committee given the variable schedules of members.  "Man
| was not made for the Sabbath..."

I agree that the long-term process should accommodate leaves of
absence.

| I think a creative use of default proxies, electronic
| meetings, options for email voting [by published deadlines]
| and similar strategies could be used to facilitate optimal
| committee operations without violating some rule set that's
| just getting in the way.

I disagree that rule sets "just get in the way."  The last few weeks
of study have convinced me of just the opposite: it's the traditional
rules that preserve a fair and democratic process.  The long-term task
is to figure out how to make the those rules easy to work with.

My thinking on this has been influenced by meeting a fellow named Ken
Clements at a Foresight gathering about a week ago.  Turns out that
Ken is on the committee that just finished IEEE 802.11, which I find
on checking the IEEE site must not only be one of the most insanely
complex standards ever written but has also just been given the PC
Magazine Award for Technical Excellence (basically the same award that
XML got last year).  Ken told me that IEEE has a bottom-up resources
model, like the one we are trying to build for OASIS, and that the
technical work runs entirely according to Robert's.  In fact, the
whole huge IEEE structure runs according to Robert's.

Ken noted that it had taken some time for IEEE to work out just how to
use Robert's effectively, but after looking around the IEEE site
(www.ieee.org), it's clear to me that Robert's can support major
technical standards work.  I think that we can learn a lot from this
model.

Jon