Re: Possible interim process fix - Existing Committees

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

[Terry Allen:]

| They will be dismayed to learn that OASIS didn't follow its own
| procedure
[...]
| There are in fact no existing committees.

I understand Terry's point, but I have to disagree with this
characterization of the current committees.

The OASIS board did, in fact, set up a committee procedure and the
committees have, in fact, been following it.  What I've been calling
our "default process" is something that took me (working on and off)
about two months to formulate, and even after all my attempts to
explain it, I don't think it's easy to see what I'm talking about
unless you hold the bylaws up to a strong light and squinch your eyes
just right.  The "real" rules that I maintain are implied by the
bylaws are the result of a chain of logic that is, shall we say, not
obvious, and as a matter of historical fact it's pretty clear that
they are not what the people who wrote our bylaws actually had in
mind.

We've ended up in our current state because I came to the conclusion
that the changes we need to make are too big to effect without
changing the bylaws, and changing the bylaws means (to me) that we
have to be absolutely sure exactly what they say -- perhaps more sure,
I'm starting to think, than the people who wrote them in the first
place.

But I don't think that the almost medieval scrutiny we've been giving
the letter of our bylaws should blind us to some basic facts.

1. The procedure under which we've been working was put in place with
   the knowledge and approval of the OASIS membership by duly elected
   officers of the corporation who were exercising due diligence in
   the application of their understanding of the bylaws (which
   understanding is almost certainly closer to the intention of the
   people who drew up the bylaws than is the result of my analysis).

2. The committees have been working according to the procedure put in
   place by the elected board.

3. The procedure that the committees have been following is fair,
   nondiscriminatory, and consensus-based.

Bearing in mind as usual that I have no legal training, it's my belief
that the process under which our committees have been operating is
basically sound and that the deviations from the letter of our bylaws
that I seem to see are (if they even exist) certainly unintentional
and probably legally inconsequential.

So I don't think it's accurate to say that the current process is
substantially broken and that the committees don't actually exist;
that would be a little like saying that the government of Taiwan
doesn't actually exist.  I think it is accurate to say that the
process we've been using is too informal for what we want to do with
it.  Getting more formal means that we, the PAC, are obligated to put
ourselves through contortions that would earn us pride of place in
Cirque du Soleil, but it doesn't mean that we have to put the
committees through that, too.

Jon