All,
Having some level of scrutiny by all members is important to maintain the credibility of OASIS as an authoritative standards development
organization. I don't worry much about getting
too many specifications of less than stellar quality published because in the
long run, the marketplace will determine which ones are best and worth building
conforming products.
My 2 cents worth ....
Jerry Smith
-----Original Message-----
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
