OASIS Organizational Voting is Somewhat Absurd?

An issue about the 
way OASIS holds organizational votes to move TC drafts to OASIS specifications 
has been gnawing on me for quite a while. 

 

Under the current 
rules, 15% of organizational members have to vote yes on a specification. 
Currently, according to my rough research, this is 15% of 342 voting 
organizations or 52 positive votes required *minimum*. 

 

Now, OASIS TCs do 
work in a number of very specialized areas yet votes are expected by the general 
organizational membership. An example is the recent request to vote on the CAP 
1.1 standard. I have no reason to believe that CAP is not a fine proposal 
and worthy of approval, and I personally think it sounds valuable. However, I 
also have no way of knowing if there aren't serious problems with it. I am not a 
domain expert, and I doubt there are 52 organizations in OASIS that are. 

 

Having been involved 
in LegalXML in the very early days, I can only imagine this issue about 
competence and interest in a specialized area could be even more acute for other 
topical areas. 

 

It 
appears that the only way specifications like CAP can emerge as an OASIS 
specification is for parties to approve the spec who have no domain expertise 
and no business justification to invest time in reviewing the 
specification.  An OASIS specification vote then becomes largely a 
matter of rubberstamping the TC's output, thus undercutting the value of the 
"OASIS Specification" stamp of approval. Additionally, as a TC co-chair, I'm concerned 
that getting approval for a specification at the OASIS level is purely a 
political "vote for my spec PLEASE" effort which is a waste of time for the TC 
chair and a meaningless gesture for the organizational voters (a role I also 
play for Visa). 

 

Does anyone else 
feel this way? 

 

It would seem more 
rational to have some sort of process that requires review and 
positive acceptance by some subset of the membership (e.g. broken down by 
topical interest areas, etc) while retaining the right for *all* organizational 
members to object as they do now. 

 

Thoughts?

 

    
-Gabe

__________________________________________________ 
 

Chief Systems Architect 
Innovation Group
Visa International 

Phone: +1.650.432.3696   Fax: 
+1.650.554.6817