Re: Simplify, simplify, simplify...

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

[singer@almaden.ibm.com:]

| In that light, let me suggest that we may want to look at doing to
| Robert's what XML did to SGML -- that is, take the 20% of the
| complexity which provides 80% of the benefit.

I've come back around to thinking that something like this is the best
answer to the multiple-language problem.

1. Normatively, use Robert's; all that stuff is in there for a good
practical reason.  But operate under committee rules.

2. For committees that speak English, provide a Committee Manual that
summarizes the part of Robert's that applies to committees.  I do
believe that a good editor could get this down to quite a bit less
than 20 percent of the current edition of Robert's; there's an awful
lot of stuff in there that applies to things like conventions and
boards, and with the full text as the ultimate authority, we could
boil the essentials for committees back down to the pocket manual that
Major Robert originally had in mind.

3. For committees working in languages other than English, translate
the Committee Manual.

This appears from a little time spent poking around the IEEE site to
be how they handle both the process problem and the language problem.

| I worry that we are heading in a direction which will either
| require a full-time parlimentarian for every working group
| or which would allow the technical discussions to be
| overshadowed by parlimentary manuevers.

Well, if every church committee, Elk's lodge, and labor union local
that runs under Robert's can appoint one of their number to play
parliamentarian, then I don't see why we can't require technical
committees to do the same thing.  This is not rocket science.  And I'm
not worried about parliamentary maneuvering.  I don't think that
people will put up with that if it's empty, and when there are real
issues to be resolved, I think it's good to have the process for
resolving them.

As I pointed out in my reply to Robin, arguments for a loose process
seem to assume the existence of an authority that can be appealed to
in resolving the hard cases.  In the absence of that authority you are
left with the will of the majority as the only final court of appeal.
If you start with majority rule operating independently of a
centralized authority and work forward you end up with something very
much like what Robert ended up with.

| If, as I believe to be the case, most working groups will do
| their work primarily by e-mail and phone, with face-to-face
| meetings being a relatively rare event (useful, but rare!),
| we need to have a ruleset in place which takes advantage of
| the medium.

Agreed, but I think the right way to get there is to keep the forms
we've worked out since Magna Carta and figure out how to realize them
in the current media.

Jon