Re: ratifying the charter?

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

[karl.best@oasis-open.org:]

| While I preferred to discuss the general case, the specific
| example may be in order. This week a the Security Services TC was
| formed. The stated purpose of the TC is to create security
| specifications using S2ML as the starting point. Another group of
| people would like to work on security, but they want to use
| AuthXML as the starting point.

Then they should start another TC.

| The obvious solution is to have two separate committees (and
| that's probably what will happen) but I'd like to make it possible
| for the two groups to work together to create a single spec rather
| than two separate specs. That would require that the committee
| members vote to "clarify" (or whatever) what the starting point of
| their technical work is. Must it be S2ML, as originally stated, or
| can it include other technologies as well?

Such coordination is what Joint Committees are intended to
provide.  If the two committees want to cooperate, then they
should be encouraged to form a JC; if they don't want to
cooperate, then they won't anyway.  The process assumes that the
best way to get good specs is to allow each group do what it
thinks right and then let the market sort it out.  Trying to force
a compromise from outside will just result in a single bad
specification instead of two possibly good ones.

Jon