Posting DITA specs to the wiki

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

**Forwarding on behalf of Mary McRae**

DITA XML.org Editorial Board,
OASIS staff have been working hard to evaluate the Editorial Board's request to
make the DITA specifications available for public comment on XML.org. While we
are all excited by the opportunity to provide a more dynamic mechanism for
receiving public comments, the project poses several significant challenges
that we feel may be insurmountable at this time.

The OASIS TC Process document (which is intimately connected to our
Intellectual Property Rights Policy) is very specific about the collection and
handling of public comments. TCs are required to transparently acknowledge,
track, audit, and record the disposal of all public comments--and their
mechanism for doing so is expressly defined as a mailing list. Most other
standards bodies process public comments in much the way OASIS does--and for
much the same reasons. Encouraging public comments through a wiki would require
changing our TC Process, and that can only be done by the OASIS Board of
Directors.

We would recommend the Board consider a change if the Wiki comment mechanism
did not require much implementation resources or if it could be used for most
OASIS specifications. Unfortunately, neither condition is true.

Simply installing a hyperlinked version of the DITA specifications in a Wiki
would not address the requirements we have for access (user identification)
control and proper comment auditing, leaving DITA open to the risk of
unauthorized contributions and subsequent licensing claims against
implementers. The transactional machinery needed to protect DITA from these
risks would require a significant investment in programming time.

To take advantage of Wiki comments, OASIS specifications would have to be
authored in XML and the vast majority are not. While the DITA standard, along
with a handful of others, are authored using structured markup, most are not.
The resulting HTML does not readily lend itself to the decomposition and
hypertext linking necessary to take advantage of a
wiki-based commenting system.

OASIS IT resources are currently prioritized on projects that benefit a broader
range of our membership.

Although we do not believe this a project OASIS can take on at this time, we do
intend to continue to evaluate this issue and hope to revisit it as soon as
resources allow.

Mary McRae
Manager of TC Administration
OASIS