Rob-
Thats exactly what I was thinking.
+2
-Gabe
From: Philpott, Robert
[mailto:]
Sent: Thursday, September 29,
2005 9:48 AM
To: Wachob, Gabe;
Subject: RE: [chairs] OASIS
Organizational Voting is Somewhat Absurd?
+1. It’s not
easy for even moderate-sized TC’s to avoid having to send out the plea for
votes. I can imagine that’s a huge pain for small TC’s. Especially since
I seem to recall the rule used to be 10%, right?
Perhaps OASIS could
establish official subject matter domains (e.g. the categories under which
TC’s are listed on the web page). Then each organization could declare
as part of its membership, which of those domains it wishes to have votes in
(perhaps an organization is required to choose some minimal number of
them?). Then the organizational votes for standardization could require
some higher % of domain-qualified organizations to vote for the
standardization of a spec.
There would need to
be some mechanism to ensure a minimum level of participation in each domain,
but it seems that could be worked out.
Rob
Philpott
Senior Consulting
Engineer
RSA
Security Inc.
Tel:
781-515-7115
Mobile: 617-510-0893
Fax:
781-515-7020
Email:
I-name: =Rob.Philpott
From: Wachob,
Gabe [mailto:]
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 12:28
PM
To:
Subject: [chairs] 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
