Re: Initializing the PAC

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

[Eduardo.Gutentag@eng.sun.com:]

| Jon, I believe that the problem is that what you explain
| makes perfect sense, but it does not percolate all the way
| down to the prose that is being offered for sign up. Having
| already signed up for the PAC, mostly because I think that
| time is of the essence, this is what I think many people
| would have liked to have received. Mind you, I am not
| proposing that you change what has been already sent, only
| that in the future the tone of the messages for other
| committees could be something like this:
[...]
| [ ] I hereby request to be counted as a non-voting member of the PAC
| 
|     I understand that as a non-voting member of the OASIS PAC
|     committee I will have access to all email discussions, I will
|     be able to attend all face to face meetings and participate in
|     all telephone conferences, and that I will be able to have my
|     voice heard in all matters brought up for discussion, but that
|     I will not be able to vote formally for or against any of the
|     proposals, and I will not be counted in determining whether
|     there is the necessay quorum for voting.

This contains a guarantee of participation by non-members that we
can't make under Robert's.  As I pointed out earlier, Robert's
guarantees to every society (p. 639) the right, by majority vote, to
exclude persons who are not voting members; the extreme form of this
is commonly called "executive session."  So while we can guarantee
access to email discussions, we can't guarantee participation in phone
conferences under our present bylaws, because a committee can decide
by majority vote to restrict phone conferences to voting members
(which under some circumstances may be a practical necessity).

I suggest that we defer discussion of this point until we return to
the issues list for the long-term process.

Jon