jordan2175
commented
5 months ago I agree that we should work on a policy document. But I want to push back on some wrongful assumptions.
- We are no longer in the 1990s. People do not use email or list-srv email lists to discuss things. Nor do they use email based threaded discussion boards. Those were fantastic back in 1994.
- You can easily lock down Slack to only allow members. We did that in the CTI TC and in the CACAO TC and in the OpenC2 TC. It is not hard at all. And those TCs are the largest TCs OASIS has ever had.
- Saying you can not do business over Slack or things like it, is like saying you can not have a direct email conversation, or phone call, or even a web call to discuss things. Keep in mind that TC meetings over zoom or webex or Gotomeeting or Meet do business all of the time and most of that is never recorded in a way that public people can come back and review. If, and I mean IF there are meeting minutes they are usually so sparse and un-useful that someone would never be able to go back and figure out how or why something was done. There is no email thread to follow all of the discussions, because it is not the 1990s anymore.
- Sometimes all of the voting members are in slack and are participating in every discussion. So in these cases it is better than a TC Meeting that is over zoom where you may only get half of the voting members.
Now with all of that said, we should write some documentations to help TCs do better at documenting decisions. And if a decision is made by the majority of voting members that are participating in a slack conversation, then maybe they should send an email at the end of the week that just documents the various things. What CTI and CACAO have done is try to send a note to the email list saying the following was talked about or the following changes decisions have been made?
What I have seem some groups in other standards bodies do, which I kind of like (though it is a lot more work). Is they have a separate document open that documents changes and decisions on a section by section basis. But that runs into problems especially in the early days when document structures can change a lot and very significantly. As section 2.1 may be come section 4.4 and then 7.1 and then 1.3 and then back to 2.8.
This is somewhat tangential to this conversation but deals with the preceding paragraph. This is why I think OASIS should adopt a model where work is done by contributions. Especially for new work items. Like there should be authors of a contribution that come to the TC with something that is somewhat fleshed out and it only becomes a CSD once it is a tangible thing.
chet-ensign
sparrell
cabralje
Vasileios-Mavroeidis
Jason has reminded me that we do not have policy documented for use of Slack, Skype or other chat tools by projects. Currently, tools like Slack violate our transparency requirements: non-members have to ask to be added before they can see the discussion; there is no way to link to an entry so that someone outside can read the exchange; there's no archival record of the conversation; and there is no way to limit participation to members of the project.
Proj Admin has handled this historically by telling projects that Slack, etc., are not approved OASIS platforms and that any exchanges that take place have no more standing that a hallway conversation. No work can be done there. Specifically, no contributions can be made there, no approvals can happen there, and it is up to the members to police its use. Note that the verb here is "tell."
We don't suggest telling projects that they can't use these tools because they are too convenient and they can easily go off and do them on their own anyway.
So we think it would make sense to put the policy into writing. That ensures that the board has given it consideration and also ensures that we tell everybody the same story every time.
While this could be done as tweaks to the TC Process and OP Rules, it may be better - since something new will certainly come along - to draft it as its own policy.