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The difficulty of process design is to ensure
that work and effort are removed, not added,
while ensuring the quality of the work is
the same or better. While it is useful to
the organization for members to get value
by membership, exclusivity does not provide
value. Value is provided by ensuring the
work is of the highest quality possible, and
for a specification or standards organization,
this is doubly true. The goal of specification
is clearly productization; whereas, the goal
of standardization is the highest possible
quality for all products of a given type. If
the rights of members are to be construed as
to having the earliest access to information
valuable to productization, then it is to their
benefit to ensure it is information of the
highest quality and exclusivity does not
guarantee or even contribute to this.
If non-members cannot contribute at the earliest
phases of specification or standardization,
it is possible to lose valuable information
needed to ensure quality products and quality
standards. While the openness of OASIS
in comparison to some organizations is not
in dispute, the side effect of automatic
enforcement may be particularly damaging
in nascent areas of specification. Some
expertise will automatically become unavailable
to OASIS when the latitude formerly available
to the chairs is removed for discretion with
regards to where discussions are held. This
is particularly true in the early phases.
Another predictable effect is that innovation requiring
research and narrow bands of expertise will
move away from the organizations whose policies
do not enable that latitude. As in the non-RAND
policy of the W3C, the predictable effect is
a narrowing of the scope of the domains which this
organization can reasonably be expected to
work. Yet it is the wide scope of discussion that
often enables new areas with encumbered technologies
to be discovered early.
It may be the case that lack of discretionary policy
for the chairs will have the effect of limiting
discussion in ways deleterious to the quality of
the organizational products.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
len bullard
-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Best [mailto:karl.best@oasis-open.org]
Nothing at OASIS is done behind closed doors, but we must also require
that the members of the TC who are doing the technical work and making
the decisions are members of OASIS; to do otherwise would diminish the
value of membership in the consortium, and as it is the members of the
consortium who provide the resources to support this work through the
payment of their membership dues it is not fair to them that other,
non-paying participants would have the same rights.
So, in summary, there is absolutely no change of policy here, just the
new ability to use a system to enforce what previosuly we left up to the
chairs to enforce.
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