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Subject: Minutes of the OASIS PAC, 1999.12.03-10
MINUTES OF THE OASIS PROCESS ADVISORY COMMITTEE, 1999.12.03-10
This summarizes the activities of the PAC for the period from 3 to 10
December 1999.
1999.12.03
The OASIS board formally approved the formation of the PAC.
The members are:
Terry Allen (tallen@sonic.net)
Jon Bosak (bosak@eng.sun.com), chair
Robin Cover (robin@isogen.com)
Eduardo Gutentag (eduardo@eng.sun.com)
Deborah Lapeyre (dalapeyre@pop.mindspring.com)
Mary McRae (sgmlgeek@top.monad.net)
Murray Maloney (murray@muzmo.com)
Tommie Usdin (btusdin@mulberrytech.com)
Lauren Wood (lauren@sqwest.bc.ca)
Other subscribers to the workprocess mailing list are now
formally considered to be observers (though of course their
input is welcome).
1999.12.06-08
In conjunction with the XML 99 and Markup Technologies conferences
in Philadelphia, we held pre-announced meetings as summarized
below. All decisions noted here were by unanimous vote of the
members present. The description of the meeting 1999.12.06 is
based partly on minutes taken by Debbie Lapeyre.
1999.12.06 (at the Philadelphia Convention Center)
Members present: Allen, Bosak (chair), Cover, Gutentag,
Lapeyre, McRae, Usdin, Wood
Observers: Sean Wood Bray, Jon Parsons, Norm Walsh
We decided that we would hold two-hour fortnightly phone
conferences on Thursdays from 2-4 p.m. California time. Sun
Microsystems will host the phone conferences. The first four
meetings will be held on the following dates:
1999.12.23
2000.01.06
2000.01.20
2000.02.03
(Note from the chair: We will begin with just the formally
appointed members of the PAC and decide as one of our first
items of business whether it's practical to invite observers
into phone conferences. I would be interested to know whether
any of the other members of the workprocess mailing list really
want to be included in phone conferences so that we can see
whether this is a real issue.)
We received an oral report from Jon Parsons, OASIS
Secretary/Treasurer, of discussions he had with OASIS counsel
regarding how best to create technical committees or working
groups under our existing bylaws. According to Jon, it is the
opinion of counsel that our best option was for the board to
create an advisory committee under Art. 5 Sect. 2 of the bylaws
and empower that committee to create and oversee technical
committees (or whatever it's decided to call them). This is
essentially the same plan that was developed at the meeting
between Allen, Bosak, Gutentag, Nicholson, and Mikula on 19
November in San Jose.
We decided to proceed with a recommendation to the board
instantiating this plan.
We decided that of the likely options for naming the working
groups, our first choice was "technical committee," our second
choice was "technical subcommittee," and our third choice was
"working group."
We asked Jon Parsons to check with counsel to see whether we
could use the name "technical committee" for our working
groups, with fallback to "technical subcommittee" if that
failed to pass legal review.
We decided that we preferred "Advisory Committee for Technical
Committees (ACTC)" as the name of the committee to be created
by the board to oversee the work groups if we could use the
term "technical committee" to refer to those groups and
"Advisory Committee for Technical Subcommittees (ACTSC)" if we
could not.
1999.12.06 (informal dinner meeting at Thai Cuisine, Philadelphia)
Members present: Allen, Bosak (chair), Gutentag, Wood
Observers: Sean Wood Bray, Tim Bray
This gathering is noted because it was to have been one of the
series of meetings planned for this session, but in fact a
quorum could not be obtained, and thus no business was
conducted.
1999.12.07 (at the Philadelphia Convention Center)
Members present: Allen, Bosak (chair), Cover, Gutentag,
Lapeyre, McRae, Usdin, Wood
We agreed that the basic features of the interim process would
be as follows:
- ACTC appoints chair or "protochair" (the existing chair in
the case of "existing" committees; we agreed that it was not
necessary to resolve the question of whether our current
committees really exist)
- A mailing list is created (if one does not already exist)
- The (proto)chair proposes a meeting schedule, including
expected face-to-face meetings and phone conferences
- Active members of the list commit to the schedule
- The (proto)chair requests the ACTC to create the TC,
appointing the members who have committed to the schedule
We agreed that it is not a requirement for the interim process
to be able to serve longer than the next few months, since we
intend to replace it with a long-term process by the time of
the June 2000 GCA meeting in Paris.
With this thought in mind, we agreed that the ACTC should
consist initially of the chairs of the present technical
committees, and that as it created each new TC, the ACTC would
recommend to the board that the board appoint the chair (or one
of the co-chairs) of the newly created TC to the ACTC.
Other possibilities for the composition of the ACTC that were
considered and rejected included liaisons from other
organizations; volunteers from the OASIS membership; and
members at large appointed by the board.
The chair was instructed to draw up a detailed draft embodying
this plan for consideration at the meeting to be held the next
day (see below).
We finished this meeting with the beginnings of our discussion
of the long-term process. In brainstorming mode, members
suggested the following (non-exhaustive) list of use cases to
provide some initial context:
TCs created under the OASIS process ab ovo
TCs (or less organized groups) originating outside of OASIS
and brought into the OASIS process part way through the
creation of a deliverable
Dueling TCs (industry harmonization efforts)
An existing technical specification needing:
- blessing
- maintenance
- reality checking
An unorganized group
A work item asked for by an outside organization
At the request of some members who wanted a better explanation
than provided by the Process Outline previously published, the
chair sketched his personal vision of the long-term process.
The basic points were as follows:
To allow for the variety of use cases, the process must be
modularized and pipelined to provide multiple entry points.
The chair imagines the basic modules to be:
- idea phase
- charter phase
- work phase
- OASIS blessing (whether this can be called a "standard"
is an open issue)
- international standardization by ISO (e.g.)
To scale, the process must make no more than linear demands
on OASIS, because the funds available from member dues are a
linear function of the number of members. Thus, the
creation of a TC must in the general case incrementally
require from OASIS only the creation of a new mailing list
plus a linear increase in demands on corporation resources
such as the web server, publicity, legal, etc. This would
seem to explicitly rule out top-down management, because the
overhead of top-down management is proportional to the
number of interdependencies that have to be managed and
therefore tends to be combinatorial.
While exceptions can be made on a discretionary basis, it
seems to the chair that the costs of phone conferences and
meetings must in the general case come from sponsors of the
work to be accomplished by a TC.
Certain other features seem to the chair to flow from the
basic scalability requirement:
- bottom-up (and therefore Darwinian with regard to
overlaps)
- democratic
- automatically maintained ("autopilot")
The vision suggested by the Process Outline is one of many
different kinds of self-supporting committees arranged in a
kind of web: TCs, voluntary coordination committees, charter
committees, translation committees, etc.
At this point, however, the chair is no longer certain that
a hierarchical structure is not compatible with a bottom-up
resource model. There are many formally hierarchical
organizational structures that appear from a distance to be
top-down but are revealed upon closer examination to be
bottom-up. Churches, labor unions, and fraternal lodges are
examples of organizations that exhibit a top-down formal
hierarchy but derive their resources from the bottom up.
Thus, he is not now as certain as he was when he wrote the
Process Outline that TCs must be autonomous in order to meet
the scalability requirement.
1999.12.08 (formal dinner meeting at the Inn Philadelphia)
Members: Allen, Bosak (chair), Cover, Gutentag, McRae, Usdin
The chair reported that Jon Parsons had spoken with the counsel
for OASIS and that (while he preferred "technical
subcommittees") he saw no legal reason why we could not use
"technical committees," which we had already decided we
preferred.
The PAC reviewed a draft of the interim process prepared by the
chair, made (by general consent) some small changes, and
approved it as a recommendation by the PAC to the board.
1999.12.09 (at the Philadelphia Convention Center)
The PAC chair (Bosak) reported the final interim process
recommendation to the OASIS board of directors. The board
expressed an intention to deal formally with the recommendation
in its phone conference of 1999.12.13. It was suggested by
members of the board that the initial membership of the ACTC
include the OASIS CTO as its chair, and the PAC chair expressed
his opinion that this would be a good idea.
The process recommendation is contained in a separate message
to this list.
Jon Bosak
Chair, OASIS Process Advisory Committee
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