PROPOSED CHANGES TO THE DEFAULT PROCESS

Jon Bosak
Los Altos, California
1999.11.01

Here are what seem to me to be the changes or additions that would
have to be made in order to adapt the currently specified committee
process to fit technical committees of the kind contemplated in the
proposed process outline.  

For reasons of efficiency, it would be desirable to implement as many
of the changes to the default committee process as possible through
decisions of the board rather than changes to the Bylaws.  The Bylaws
(Art. 5 Sect. 3) state that

   The Board of Directors may also adopt rules and regulations
   pertaining to the conduct of meetings of committees to the
   extent that such rules and regulations are not inconsistent
   with the provision of these Bylaws.

Unfortunately, most of the changes we need to make will be seen to be
inconsistent with the current Bylaws once the process inherent in the
current Bylaws is completely understood, as I have explained
elsewhere.  In the following I have tried to point out the reasons for
this under each proposed modification to the current process.

There's no denying that amending the Bylaws is a certain amount of
trouble, but we are going to have to amend the Bylaws anyway to no
longer be in flagrant violation of Art. 5 Sect. 2, which mandates the
appearance of the word "advisory" in the name of every OASIS
committee.  We customarily don't put "advisory" in the names of
technical committees, and I think that practice over the last several
years indicates that we don't want to.  So there's no avoiding a
change to the Bylaws in any case, and such change can conveniently
accompany other changes to the Bylaws already under consideration by
the Board of Directors.

In general, I don't think that we should be afraid of proposing
amendments to the Bylaws if that's what it takes to operate
effectively.  As OASIS members, we can change the Bylaws directly at
any members' meeting or more practically through a mail ballot.  If I
have correctly interpreted the provisions of Article 9 and of Sections
5, 6, and 9 of Article 13 of the Bylaws, changing the Bylaws by means
of a mail ballot is not all that hard if the changes are
uncontroversial.  Only one-third of the voting members have to return
a ballot, and only a majority of those voting have to approve the
changes.  We can do this.

The minimum changes that I think we need to make to realize the
technical committees described in the process outline are as follows:

   1. Remove the requirement that OASIS committees have to
      have the word "advisory" in their names.  That this will
      require a change to the OASIS Bylaws (Art. 5 Sect. 2) seems
      to me to be beyond question.

   2. Replace the default rules for appointment of members
      (Robert's pp. 482-487) with a different set of rules
      designed for committees whose formation is nearly
      autonomous and whose membership is allowed to change
      without approval from outside the committee.  This
      involves, among other things, definition of a voting member
      (as opposed to someone who just drops in from time to
      time), rules for maintaining voting membership, and
      procedures for the termination and reinstatement of voting
      status.  These new rules for participation represent a
      basic change in the relationship between a board and its
      committees expressed in Robert's, where the members of each
      committee are individually appointed by election or by an
      action of the board, and by the current OASIS Bylaws, which
      state that all OASIS committees are advisory to the board.
      I believe that a change of this magnitude will require
      modification of Article 5 of the Bylaws.

   3. Explicitly allow committees to entertain the motion called
      Previous Question, perhaps with the threshold for passage
      raised to two-thirds of the total voting membership of the
      committee rather than two-thirds of those voting.  Allowing
      committees to close debate directly contradicts the rules
      for committees in Robert's and will therefore, I believe,
      require modification of Article 5 of the Bylaws.

   4. Define a process for approving a Committee Specification
      and registering it with the Secretary of OASIS.  Since a
      Committee Specification can have considerable normative
      force under the right circumstances in a particular
      industry and since a committee can approve a Committee
      Specification on its own authority, the bar for approval
      should be set quite high.  I think that in this case it
      would be appropriate to use the ISO criteria for approval
      of a draft standard:

      2.7.3 A Final Draft International Standard having
         been circulated for voting is approved if

         a) a two-thirds majority of the votes cast by the
            P-members [i.e., not the observers] of the technical
            committee or subcommittee are in favor, and

         b) not more than one-quarter of the total number of
            votes cast are negative.

         Abstentions are excluded when the votes are counted, as
         well as negative votes not accompanied by technical
         reasons.

         Technical reasons for negative votes are submitted to
         the technical committee or subcommittee secretariat for
         consideration at the time of the next review of the
         International Standard.

      We would obviously have to provide some reasonable
      alternative to the disposition of negative votes referred
      to in the last paragraph of the ISO procedure.

      Requiring previous notice can also be used to get the kind
      of formality we think is appropriate for approval of a
      Committee Specification.  Requiring the vote to take place
      by email would both give notice and also have the effect of
      changing the criterion from two-thirds of those voting to
      two-thirds of the voting members.

      The concept of a standalone specification produced on the
      authority of a committee is fundamentally different from
      the concept of a committee report in Robert's and will
      therefore, I believe, require modification of Article 5 of
      the Bylaws.

   5. Make explicit the scalability of the process in Robert's
      by stating that when a committee exceeds a certain size (20
      voting members, say) it automatically changes from a
      "committee" to a "full assembly" for purposes of
      parliamentary procedure.  Full assemblies have certain
      options for conducting business in a relatively informal
      manner (Committee of the Whole, Quasi Committee of the
      Whole, Informal Consideration), but the added level of
      default formality is important to have in place once a
      deliberative body becomes larger than the size of the group
      for which committee rules are appropriate.  This applies in
      particular to the rules that kick in to provide for orderly
      debate in a large group.  Since this change does not
      contradict the process for committees in Robert's, it could
      probably be implemented in a standing order of the board.

   6. Provide committee rules specially adapted to the
      construction and approval of working drafts.  This can be
      accomplished on a case-by-case basis in each committee
      through the establishment (for example) of editorial teams
      implemented as subcommittees of each committee, with the
      report of a subcommittee being its working draft, but we
      may want different rules than Robert's provides for
      subcommittee reports, and we certainly want to provide
      uniformity of procedure in the editorial work of the
      committees.  The specification of such procedures doesn't
      seem on first consideration to be likely to involve a
      direct contradiction of Robert's, and we therefore have
      reason to hope that it could be implemented through a
      standing order of the board.

[workprocess committee members: anything else?]