Agenda item for July ConfCall: September meeting

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

I just got off the phone with one of the XML World staff,
discussing options for our committee to meet at the Boston
XML World conference in September. If we can resolve what
we want to do in this week's teleconference, that would be
ideal for getting a more formal request back to them and
having it realized.

The planned BOF time slots are for the lunches: Noon to
1:30 is about the max. Given the exigencies of actually
feeding ourselves and getting to the following session,
we would probably be lucky to net an hour for real
discussion. The other option is to use an evening time
slot, which the organizers will schedule eventually,
though they are trying to hold back to see the whole
volume of requests for evening events. I get the sense
that our meeting (as a publicized program item if
spectators are allowed) is in line with their ideal,
because they seem to prefer events that appeal only to
those who are deeply into some part of XML, while the
general audience will avoid overload by taking nights
off. We could have both a meeting among ourselves and
a spectated meeting, in which case I advocate having the
more private meeting first, so that we can review how we
might involve the audience in the open meeting. On the
other hand, we may prefer to have a smaller meeting when
we want to achieve closure. Don't forget that we will
need to tell the conference organizers how much time we
want for that evening session.

So here it is in the form of a motion: I move that we
ask the XML World organizers for an evening time slot
for a publicly-spectated meeting which will be the
formal meeting called for in our meeting schedule,
authorize the conference organizers to publish that
meeting notice in their conference program (and
similar media, like their Web site), that we make an
advance determination of whether we might call for
audience input on any discussion items that will (or
may) come up at that meeting, and also plan to have a
meeting of just the committee ahead of that public
session (probably in a BOF timeslot but not called as
a BOF) to work out how we will maximize the utility
of the formal meeting.
.................David Marston