[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Subject: Minutes of the OASIS PAC meeting 2001.06.13
MINUTES OF THE OASIS PROCESS ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING 2001.06.13
Voting Members Present
Karl Best
Jon Bosak (chair)
Robin Cover
Eduardo Gutentag
Ken Holman
Debbie Lapeyre
Tommie Usdin
Lauren Wood
Proceedings
Debbie Lapeyre was unable to act as secretary this meeting, so
the chair took notes and has prepared these minutes.
We proceeded with the plan decided on in meetings held
2001.04.18 and 2001.05.30 to consider a number of issues
related to the existing OASIS TC process before ending this
phase of the process development work. In this meeting, we got
about half way through an issues list provided by Karl Best.
In the summary below, the numbers refer to the issue numbers in
Karl's list.
We will meet again on Wednesday, 2001.06.27, from 11 a.m. to 1
p.m. California time to consider the remaining issues.
In addition to the recommendations listed below, the PAC hereby
requests the OASIS board of directors (1) to note that the PAC
intends to submit all of our proposed amendations to the
current OASIS TC process for consideration by the board at the
board meeting scheduled for 2 August 2001, and (2) to schedule
a special meeting or conference call after formation of the new
board following the annual board elections in order that the
PAC may present the plan arrived at between the PAC and the TAC
regarding the direction to be taken in further development of
the OASIS technical committee process. We propose a phone
conference from 11 a.m. from 1 p.m. California time 22 August
2001 for this meeting.
Jon
##################################################################
DISPOSITION OF ISSUES, 2001.06.13
##################################################################
Issue 1a: Identification of related work at time of TC Formation
Discussion: We cannot require proposers of TCs to know of the
existence of similar initiatives.
Resolution: We assume that at some point OASIS will provide
informal, non-normative guidelines for the conduct of TCs, and
we agree that those guidelines should say that a TC's web
presence should include the identification of similar or
related activities where such activities are known to the
participants.
Editorial note: Here, as elsewhere, the process assumes that
public oversight of the process will reveal the existence of
competing or overlapping efforts.
##################################################################
Issue 1b: Conformance testing
Resolution: No action needed here.
##################################################################
Issue 2: Changes to TC charters after formation
Discussion: There are no TC charters per se. The process says
that a submission for the creation of a TC must contain these
two items, among others:
- Statement of purpose, which must be germane to the mission
of OASIS.
- List of deliverables, with projected dates.
- The meeting schedule for the year following the formation of
the TC, or until the projected date of the final
deliverable, whichever comes first.
The section covering changes to these items reads as follows:
12. TC Revision
A TC can clarify its statement of purpose; revise its
deliverables; and change its meeting schedule. Such
changes shall be reported on the TC announcement list,
and any revisable publicly visible description (e.g., Web
page) promulgated by the TC shall be updated to reflect
such changes.
The fact we have to deal with is that TCs are making changes as
authorized in Section 12 quoted above without making the
required announcements.
Resolution: Karl should notify groups that have been making
changes to their purpose or deliverables under Section 12 that
they need to submit notice of such changes to Karl for
publication on the TC announcement list.
##################################################################
Issue 3: Require founding members of a TC to come from different
companies.
Discussion: This was exhaustively considered when we designed
the process. There are basically two ways to regard the
members of TCs: as company representatives or as individual
experts. The OASIS TC process follows ISO and many other
formal standards bodies in considering the participants of
technical committees to be individual experts rather than
representatives of particular organizations. The process
relies upon this basic principle in handling logistical
problems, such as the apparatus that would otherwise be
required to certify particular people as representatives of
different companies and to designate alternates. It also
handles the case where someone switches jobs; they can almost
always deal with this by securing an individual membership at
$250, which due to the fact that there is no company
affiliation is enough to handle almost all employment
transition problems. See more on this part under Issue 6.
Resolution: No action needed.
##################################################################
Issue 4: Must be a PEOTCP at time of notice of intent to join TC
Discussion: We agree with Karl:
This is to solve an administrative problem: people are
signing up for the TC when they are not yet members;
additional time is required for additional tracking to make
sure that they obtain OASIS membership before the first
meeting. The current language does not promote scalability.
Resolution: We recommend that the first paragraph of Article 14
Section 4 be amended to add "and must be eligible for TC
participation at the time they register." after "their
intention to attend the meeting."
Before amendment:
4. First Meeting of a TC
The first meeting of a TC shall occur no less than 30
days after the announcement of its formation in the
case of a telephone meeting and no less than 45 days
after the announcement of its formation in the case of
a face-to-face meeting. Persons intending to
participate in the first meeting must register to
attend no later than 15 days prior to the event by
notifying the person named as chair of the new TC of
their intention to attend the meeting. Every PEOTCP
present at the first meeting of a TC shall be
initially a voting member of the TC.
After amendment:
4. First Meeting of a TC
The first meeting of a TC shall occur no less than 30
days after the announcement of its formation in the
case of a telephone meeting and no less than 45 days
after the announcement of its formation in the case of
a face-to-face meeting. Persons intending to
participate in the first meeting must register to
attend no later than 15 days prior to the event by
notifying the person named as chair of the new TC of
their intention to attend the meeting and must be
eligible for TC participation at the time they
register. Every PEOTCP present at the first meeting
of a TC shall be initially a voting member of the TC.
##################################################################
Issue 5. Bug in the two-out-of-three rule
The current language (which, it should be remembered, was taken
from ANSI), reads:
a. A member shall be warned by mail from the chair of the TC
upon failure to attend two out of every three successive
meetings of the TC. Membership shall be terminated if
the member fails to attend the next meeting following
transmittal of the warning.
For a description of the problem, see Eve's message to this
list under the heading "Delicate subject: changing the
attendance requirements" and dated Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:40:16
-0500:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/workprocess/200102/msg00002.html
Discussion: Mechanically, it's not the intent of the rule
that's the problem, it's the warning mechanism. Warnings
shouldn't reset the clock.
But beyond the mechanics is the more subtle management problem
of how a chair handles one of two very different cases.
Sometimes the problem is that a few very useful members are
also useful members of other committees and simply cannot
attend all of the meetings. In this case, a chair needs to be
able to support the continuing participation of such members.
But in some other cases, the problem is that a person who
wishes to be perceived as a member is not, in fact, willing to
contribute to the work. The TC process is specifically
designed to remove persons in the second category from voting
membership in the TC. The trick is how to enable the
completely automatic removal of a useless member while
permitting the chair (with the tacit consent of the TC) to
allow a useful member to break the rule occasionally.
Resolution: We recommend that the first paragraph of Article 14
Section 6 be amended as follows:
1. Insert "their first" into the first sentence of Section 6
so that it reads:
a. A member shall be warned by mail from the chair of the
TC upon their first failure to attend two out of every
three successive meetings of the TC.
2. Add "or if the member consistently fails to attend two
out of every three meetings" to the second sentence of
the same paragraph so that it reads:
Membership shall be terminated if the member fails to
attend the next meeting following transmittal of the
warning or if the member consistently fails to attend
two out of every three meetings.
##################################################################
Issue 6: Retention of membership upon change of employment
Discussion: Since TC members are individual experts whose
company affiliation is irrelevant to their membership in the
TC, most cases of this kind can be handled very
straightforwardly if the member obtains an individual
membership ($250) before leaving an OASIS member employer. But
if the member has already accepted employment with another
OASIS organization, this will be a waste of money. And there
is the increasingly frequent case where a member's employment
ceases without notice. We need to patch over the crack here
with a grace period.
Resolution: We recommend that Article 14 Section 5 of the TC
process be amended by adding this new paragraph at the end of
the section:
Persons who lose PEOTCP status for reasons including, but
not limited to, change of employment, shall have a further
14 days of TC membership in which to request a leave of
absence or re-establish eligibility.
##################################################################
Issue 7: Participation of prospective members as observers
Background: The first paragraph of Art. 14 Section 5 says:
5. TC Membership
A PEOTCP shall become a prospective member of an existing
TC by sending by mail notice of intention to participate
to the chair of the TC. Prospective membership shall
begin seven days after this notice is received. A
prospective member may attend face-to-face meetings as an
observer. A prospective member may attend phone meetings
as an observer at the discretion of the chair.
The suggestion is:
In section 5 add the requirement that a prospective TC
member participate in the TC as an observer according to the
existing "two out of three" attendance rules during the
probationary period. This would make sure that the new
member is committed and educated before being allowed to
vote.
Discussion: Everyone agrees that ideally it would be best to
require prospective members (who are serving out the 60 days or
two meetings before they can become members of a particular TC
after it's been started) to come up to speed somehow on the
committee into the midst of whose deliberations they are
entering. But when we designed the process, we discovered that
there are several serious problems with this idea:
1. The TC may be large already, and the prospective member
may not be such as the chair judges likely to actually
participate after the waiting period.
2. Under the basic rule governing the rights of an assembly
with regard to observers, prospective members, as
observers, are always subject to removal from the meeting
if the members decide to meet in executive session.
While certainly not impossible to handle, the situations
that could arise from this in the case of prospective
members attending as observers might be awkward.
3. Taking away the ability of the chair to exclude
prospective members from phone meetings could prove
either administratively unmanageable for the chair or
prohibitively expensive for the company sponsoring the
calls in the case where a large number of members
suddenly decided that they wanted to be in on the call.
At the very least, sponsors should have advance notice of
a new requirement that they support a stampede of new
members.
4. There is nothing in the existing process that prevents
prospective members from reading the archives and coming
up to speed that way.
Resolution: No action needed.
##################################################################
Issue 8: Invited experts
Discussion: Nonvoting invited experts are already allowed by
the native ability of any deliberative body to invite
observers. (Editorial note: And in my opinion, there's nothing
to prevent any committee from setting up a special category of
observers that they agree to call "invited experts" and
adopting this as a standing rule. In fact, I proposed a
mechanism for an "invited observer" status to be adopted by a
TC in the CBL proposal I submitted in February of this year.)
So the only reason we might want to change the process is to
allow certain people to become voting members of a TC without
requiring them or their organizations to pay OASIS dues. Since
the TC process (definition of a PEOTCP, Art. 14 Sect. 1)
already allows the board to designate any person or group as
eligible to participate without paying dues, the only effective
change here would allow a TC to extend individual OASIS
membership on an ad-hoc basis. We don't think TCs should be
allowed to do this.
Resolution: The guidelines (yet to be written) should point to
the section in Robert's on "Executive Session" and the rules
there pertaining to observers.
##################################################################
Issue 9: TCs with too few members
Discussion: There's nothing in Robert's to prevent a committee
from consisting of just one or two people (and indeed, such a
committee can be a very useful thing, allowing an issue, for
example, to be handled by a Motion to Commit and then
designating just one trusted person, as chair and only member
of the committee, to research something and come back with a
recommendation). But while we think that this is fine for
subcommittees of a TC, we don't like the idea of an OASIS
Technical Committee itself having fewer members than the three
we require to start it in the first place. The least
disruptive way we can think of to effect this change is to
prevent a group that falls below three members from conducting
business. The tactic adopted below utilizes the annual garbage
collection of dead groups that's in the existing process.
Resolution: We recommend that Art. 14 Section 11 of the TC
process be amended by adding a third paragraph, so that the
section in its entirety reads as follows:
11. TC Meetings
"TC meeting" shall be construed to include telephone
conferences and video conferences as well as face-to-face
meetings.
Any TC that fails to conduct at least one meeting during a
calendar year shall cease to exist at the beginning of the
calendar year immediately following.
[new paragraph:]
Any TC whose voting membership falls below three members
shall cease to exist.
##################################################################
Issue 10: Public subscription to discussion lists
Discussion: the current TC process allows for the formation of
short-term "discussion lists" (maximum life 90 days) for the
purpose of discussing the formation of a TC. Such discussion
lists are visible to the general public. The question is
whether they should also be publicly subscribable. While the
advisability of extending what is essentially a member benefit
to nonmembers is debatable, the fact that the current list
machinery will not support the automatic exclusion of
non-PEOTCPs gives this question real weight: it means that any
list that's not subscribable by everyone requires new members
to be approved manually by the chair or by OASIS
administration. There is nothing we can do about this overhead
in the case of TC lists, but we can at least step around this
in the case of discussion lists by just allowing public
subscription. While the motivation here is mainly practical
(our recommendation can be effected by simply setting a switch
in the mail server interface), allowing the public to subscribe
could also have the advantage of promoting new OASIS
memberships among persons who become engaged in the initial
discussion phase and want to follow it into TC work.
Resolution: We recommend that the first paragraph of Art. 14
Section 2 be amended to add the words "publicly subscribable"
before "discussion list."
Before amendment:
2. TC Discussion Lists
Any group of at least three PEOTCPs shall be
authorized to begin a discussion list for the purpose
of forming a TC by submitting to OASIS TC
administration the following items: [...]
After amendment:
2. TC Discussion Lists
Any group of at least three PEOTCPs shall be
authorized to begin a publicly subscribable discussion
list for the purpose of forming a TC by submitting to
OASIS TC administration the following items: [...]
(Issues 11-20 will be take up at the PAC meeting scheduled for
2001.06.27.)
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC