[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Subject: Draft of process article
I have been invited by XML.com to write an article on the current
OASIS TC process. Here's a first draft. Comments?
Jon
-----------------------------
The OASIS Process for Structured Information Standards
By Jon Bosak, Chair, OASIS Process Advisory Committee
OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards, is a non-profit corporation founded in 1993
under the name SGML Open. Originally a consortium of small
software vendors and large customers devoted to developing
guidelines for interoperability among SGML products, OASIS changed
its name in 1998 to reflect the inclusion of CGM Open and the
growing popularity of the XML subset of SGML.
In 1999 OASIS began two important projects -- the XML
registry/repository at XML.org and, in cooperation with UN/CEFACT,
the Electronic Business XML (ebXML) initiative. It also changed
its membership rules to include individual members as well as
corporate sponsors. Today OASIS is an organization in transition
whose future direction depends largely on the extent to which
interested individuals decide to participate.
The process by which OASIS develops information standards is also
in transition. The overall structure of OASIS is that of an
ordinary non-profit corporation with an elected board of
directors. The board is responsible for business and policy
decisions, while the membership itself is responsible for deciding
substantive technical issues such as the approval of
interoperability guidelines. As would be expected in what was
historically an industrial consortium, "membership" for purposes
of electing the board and voting on technical resolutions includes
just the organizational members, with one vote going to each
organization. More will be said about the relationship of
organizational and individual members below.
As a non-profit corporation, OASIS is bound by law to follow the
procedures set forth in its corporate charter and bylaws. The
OASIS bylaws, like those of most U.S. corporations, specify
Robert's Rules of Order as the procedure to be followed by the
OASIS board of directors and by committees created by the board.
Thus, adherence to Robert's is a requirement imposed by law. This
means, among other things, that members can seek legal relief if
their rights are not respected under the traditional parliamentary
process specified by Robert's.
While potentially complex and sometimes tedious, the Robert's
process has a number of advantages for an organization devoted to
the development of industrial standards. As the synthesis of some
four centuries of evolution in parliamentary procedure, it is the
epitome of majority rule in practice. It has been thoroughly
debugged and tested under just about every conceivable set of
circumstances; it is built into most of our governmental and
corporate institutions; its documentation is very widely available
(see below for further information); and perhaps most importantly,
it can continue to function even when resolving questions about
which there are deeply opposed points of view. It's not
surprising, therefore, that Robert's is the process used by ANSI,
IEEE, and a number of other highly regarded standards
organizations.
Robert's also has some disadvantages, but they are not the kind
that some people imagine. The widespread belief that Robert's
necessarily imposes an inherently slow and difficult procedure on
technical development is simply not true. Robert's rules for
committee work are much more relaxed than the rules for full
deliberative assemblies that most Americans learn in civics
classes, and in the hands of a knowledgeable chair, a committee
running under Robert's can move just as quickly as a less
structured group. It's true that the process slows down
dramatically when confronted with real disagreements among the
participants, but so does any process that recognizes disagreement
and attempts to deal with it fairly. The difference between the
traditional process and more informal ones is that the traditional
process always produces a decision no matter what the level of
disagreement, while less structured processes dodge the problem by
appealing to a higher authority or, in the worst cases, simply
ceasing to function.
The real problem with using the traditional process in standards
work has to do with its quorum requirements.
Under Robert's, committees are working groups made up of
particular individuals appointed by name. A committee can invite
observers to participate, but it cannot add voting members, or
remove voting members, or change its charter, or do anything else
that might run contrary to the intention of the body that created
it. So the composition of an existing committee can be changed
only by formal resolution of the body that appointed the
committee. There are very good reasons for this system; it
ensures that committees include only those people judged qualified
to carry out the work, and it prevents committees from being
"stacked" by the ad hoc participation of groups with views on a
particular question. But frequent personnel changes in modern
companies make the staffing of technical committees by direct
appointment unwieldy in practice.
One solution to this problem would be to appoint everyone who
expressed interest in the committee and trust that enough of them
would remain involved through the life of the committee to carry
out its work. But here the quorum requirement intervenes. A
quorum is the minimum number of voting members who have to be
present to legally conduct a meeting. By default, that number is
a majority of all the appointed members.
The quorum requirement is important because it prevents a small
subset of members from acting in the name of the committee and
thus ensures that decisions actually represent the thinking of the
majority of the group. But it is a sad fact of standards work
that few of the people who express initial interest in the work of
a committee will ever actually attend any given meeting. This
problem is exacerbated by the impossibility of substituting one
person for another without the approval of the body that created
the committee. The result is that a Robert's committee must
consist of a relatively small number of specifically named people
who are genuinely committed to attending every meeting; otherwise
it will fail to achieve a quorum and will be unable to legally
conduct business.
To address these and other issues related to the creation of
technical committees (TCs), the OASIS board of directors has
created a Process Advisory Committee (PAC) and chartered it to
develop a set of changes to the OASIS bylaws that will provide for
easier committee maintenance. The PAC is expected to deliver a
package of proposed bylaw amendments in time for distribution at
the OASIS meetings to be held in conjunction with the Paris XML
Europe conference in June 2000.
In the meantime, the OASIS board, with the advice of the PAC, has
created a temporary set of procedures for TCs based on the default
Robert's Rules process specified by the current corporate bylaws.
The complete interim procedure for the creation of an OASIS TC can
be found at
http://www.xml.org/archives/workprocess/msg00239.html
This complete procedure includes forms to be used at various
stages of the process, which can be summarized as follows.
1. To handle the creation and maintenance of TCs, the board has
instituted the Advisory Committee on Technical Committees
(ACTC). The ACTC is made up of one chair from each
technical committee and is itself chaired by the OASIS Chief
Technical Officer, an elected position that is at this
writing held by Norbert Mikula of DataChannel.
2. A group of OASIS members (individual members or employees of
member organizations) wishing to create a new OASIS TC draws
up a statement of purpose, proposes one or more discussion
leaders, and submits to the ACTC a request for the the
creation of a mailing list. Under normal circumstances, the
ACTC approves the creation of the list and appoints the
discussion leaders named in the proposal.
3. When the list is operational, the discussion leaders submit
an announcement to the membership (all of the individual
members and designated representatives of all of the
organizational members) stating the purpose and initial
membership of the list and inviting the participation of all
interested OASIS members and employees of member
organizations. The OASIS Executive Director (Laura Walker)
or the OASIS Secretary (an elected position currently held
by Jon Parsons of Xyvision) forwards the announcement to the
general membership list. Discussion on the new list begins
a week or so after the announcement.
4. After everyone interested has had a chance to join the list,
the discussion leaders post to the list a statement of
purpose for the proposed TC, a proposed TC meeting schedule,
a list of proposed deliverables, and the names of the
proposed chair. The decision of whether to determine these
parameters in advance or work them out on the mail list is
up to the discussion leaders. Then they call upon those
members of the list who agree with its proposed purpose,
deliverables, and chair(s) and who can commit to attending
the meetings to nominate themselves to be the voting members
of the committee.
5. After another week or so, a list of the names of those who
committed to attending TC meetings according to the proposed
schedule is submitted to the ACTC. The ACTC can, in theory,
create TCs with any membership it likes, but typically it
will create a TC composed of the list as submitted and will
appoint the chair named in the proposal.
6. Coincident with its creation of the new TC, the ACTC
requests the OASIS board of directors to add one of the
chairs of the new TC to the ACTC so that every OASIS TC is
represented on the ACTC.
7. Once created, a TC runs according to the default process
specified in the OASIS bylaws, which of course is Robert's.
New members can be added to the TC, but only by resolution
of the ACTC.
It should be obvious that the process just described won't scale
gracefully to a very large number of TCs. The PAC chose the
simplest procedure it could devise that would work for a few
months and still be completely legal according to the OASIS
bylaws.
Even though it's explicitly a placeholder, the interim process has
some interesting features that will almost certainly carry over
into the long-term version.
First, all the TC mail lists are publicly visible. This is
substantially different from the policies regarding the visibility
of working group mail lists in some other organizations.
Second, while the agreement to attend meetings necessarily
restricts the voting membership of TCs, any OASIS member or
employee of an OASIS member organization can subscribe to any
OASIS TC mail list at any time and can contribute to discussions
on that list. So while in form a TC consists of a small number of
members and a much larger number of observers, it can just as
easily be looked at as a large mail list whose discussions are
collected and ratified by a group of appointed voters. Which view
is more appropriate depends on the level of meaningful
contributions on the list by the non-voting members. This
structure allows a large number of "designated lurkers" to track
and comment upon the work of a TC while guaranteeing the dedicated
involvement of a group of appointees who can meet the quorum
requirement and thus provide a legal foundation for the process.
Since every TC mail list is publicly visible, there is, of course,
nothing to hinder the open discussion of OASIS TC work in public
forums open to everyone.
Another feature of the OASIS process is that voting membership
within committees is by the individual and not by the
organization. This gives OASIS an interesting bicameral quality,
not unlike the relationship between an upper and a lower house of
Parliament or the Senate and House of Representatives in the
U.S. Congress. Basic OASIS corporate policy decisions and
elections of the board of directors are by vote of the
organizational members of OASIS, but the committee votes that
determine the design of the standards produced by the TCs are made
by individuals. This means that individual OASIS members have
exactly the same status within TCs as employees of large vendors
and big XML customers, while the big players retain just enough
influence over the overall direction of the organization to keep
them paying substantial organizational dues, thus subsidizing the
lower rates for individuals.
As already noted, the PAC is working between now and the XML
Europe conference in June 2000 to define a more sophisticated
committee structure that will scale to an indefinitely large
number of TCs and will provide for the automatic addition and
removal of members. While the PAC is not a TC (it's one level up,
a sibling of the ACTC), its mail list is nevertheless open to
public view at
http://www.xml.org/archives/workprocess/
and the mail list can be joined by any OASIS member or employee of
an OASIS member organization.
The current membership of the PAC is as follows:
Terry Allen (tallen@sonic.net), Commerce One
Jon Bosak (bosak@eng.sun.com), Individual member, PAC Chair
Robin Cover (robin@isogen.com), OASIS
Eduardo Gutentag (eduardo@eng.sun.com), Sun Microsystems
Debbie Lapeyre (dalapeyre@pop.mindspring.com), Mulberry
Technologies, PAC Secretary
Mary McRae (sgmlgeek@top.monad.net), Document Management
Solutions, member of the OASIS board of directors
Tommie Usdin (btusdin@mulberrytech.com), Mulberry Technologies
Lauren Wood (lauren@sqwest.bc.ca), SoftQuad
Though appointed by the board of directors rather than the ACTC,
the PAC was formed by basically the same process sketched out
above. These are the people from among the two dozen members of
the workprocess mail list who were willing to commit to the
meeting schedule.
At this writing, the PAC is about a fourth of the way into the
design of the long-term process. Its current issues list can be
found at
http://www.xml.org/archives/workprocess/msg00094.html
A copy of the first set of issues to be formally decided by the
PAC appears as "Design Principles for OASIS Committee Process" in
the minutes of the PAC meeting of 2000.01.20, which can be found
at
http://www.xml.org/archives/workprocess/msg00073.html
If you want to track the progress of work on the long-term process
for TCs, you are invited to monitor the workprocess archive or, if
you are an OASIS member or employee of a member organization, to
join the workprocess list.
-----------------------------
About Robert's Rules of Order
-----------------------------
General Robert wrote four editions of the work that bears his
name. The last of these, a complete overhaul of the 1876
original, was published in 1915 as Robert's Rules of Order
Revised, or RROR for short. RROR went through two very minor
revisions (so minor that they kept the same page numbering), the
first appearing in 1943 and the second or "Seventy-fifth
Anniversary Edition" in 1951. RROR was printed in a format small
enough to fit in a pocket, so it was truly the "Pocket Manual of
Rules of Order" that Robert originally intended.
To maintain copyright in what had become a family industry,
Robert's heirs completely revised the work in the seventh edition,
published in 1970 as Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised
(RRONR). This edition could no longer fit in a pocket, but it was
still reasonably compact. The family continued to add to the
book, however, and the current edition -- the ninth -- is over 700
pages of lawyerly, rambling prose. To be fair, I should note that
some of this bulk is value added in the form of language that
specifies useful things like procedures for writing corporate
bylaws and rules for running political conventions, but I have to
confess that I cannot bring myself to read the current edition,
and refer to it only to consult sections pointed to from the
commendably thorough index.
Like most corporate constitutions that use Robert's as their
parliamentary authority, the OASIS bylaws contain a formula that
automatically makes each new edition of Robert's the normative
one, so in legal fact, it's the ninth edition that governs OASIS
business. But while the ninth edition is the one that serves as
our final authority, it's not where I go to answer most practical
questions about procedure. When I have a question, I go to my
copy of the 1951 edition. Aided by its shorter scope and clearer
organization, I can find the answer to most ordinary procedural
questions in under a minute.
In addition to being shorter than RRONR, RROR is written in an
old-fashioned, no-nonsense, soldierly style that I personally find
a lot easier to take than the bland corporate prose of the later
editions. This is, of course, a matter of taste, but for
committee use I would recommend ordering a copy of the 1915 RROR
(now in the public domain), which can be obtained as a paperback
reprint from Quill, ISBN 0-688-05306-8. Unfortunately, the text
of the Quill reprint has been enlarged and printed on cheaper
paper than in the original, and as a result, even this old version
no longer fits in a pocket, but it is otherwise as good an
authority on parliamentary procedure as you will find. Paperback
reprints of editions published before the major revision of 1915
are not faithful guides to current practice and should be avoided.
The 1915 RROR is also available over the Internet beginning at
http://www.constitution.org/rror/rror--00.htm
This version has been reformatted to replace all the references to
page numbers with links to sections instead, which makes it much
easier to use online. For convenience, I have downloaded the
entire book and put it in a single zip file at
http://metalab.unc.edu/bosak/rror/rror.zip
Just unzip this into a directory and start with rror--00.htm,
taking care to preserve and abide by the copyright notice at the
top of that file.
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC