[humanmarkup] HM.requirements up for vote plus notes and thoughts.

Hi Everyone,

The last version of HM.requirements which I am attaching to this post 
for your convenience, is now up for a vote of the TC members. The 
vote will last until Saturday, March 30, 2002. We will announce the 
results Sunday, March 21, 2002. It is requested that members vote on 
the TC mailing list, and if you wish your vote to be known at large, 
please copy it to the public comments list.

Last evening's chat was instructive, and I will discuss it briefly. 
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga and Rob Nixon and I attended.  Dr. Sylvia 
Candelaria de Ram was unable to connect to us by Yahoo IM, which has, 
it should be noted, been somewhat unreliable lately. She did attempt 
to connect and sent me an email to let me know. Kurt Cagle also 
attempted to attend, but was delayed by domestic complications of a 
two-year daughter nature so attempted after the session had 
concluded. Thanks to both of you.

Ranjeeth reviewed the document at the time and began the process of 
developing some rather substantial changes he felt were needed. It 
seemed apparent that this would require delaying our work in order to 
accomplish these changes, present them to the committee as whole and 
reschedule a vote on the revised document.

I noted this, and made the statement that I thought it was 
inappropriate at this stage in the process and that what I was 
prepared to do was to make typographical and grammatical corrections 
and small wording changes after this much previous work and the 
length of time that this version has been up for comment, corrections 
and changes. Rob agreed with me, and since that consitituted a 
majority, it was unnecessary to carry it further.

Ranjeeth said this was ok with him, and as I would like to point out, 
the issue is now up for a vote, so we can always start over, although 
we don't have to start from square one, but that is not what we 
decided to recommend.

After some further discussion, we decided that we would go with what 
we have and vote now. We want to make it clear that while officially 
formal if adopted, this is only a "Working Draft" and that the next 
six months will be an official RFC, Request For Comments, period if 
it is approved and thus adopted.

During these six months such concerns as Ranjeeth began developing 
last night, which simply didn't occur to him until then and really 
ought to be considered carefully, and adopted most likely, will be 
collected as as a thread in our email archives at the end of six 
months, in the normal process used by most standards organizations. 
We will meet then, decide which changes to make, make the changes we 
decide, and vote at that time for a final recommendation document. It 
should be noted that this would have been the case even if Ranjeeth 
had not started finding changes he thought we need to consider.

I have the transcript, and I will post it separately. Because it is 
lengthy, I did not want to add it to this message.

In further developments, Ranjeeth noted that he could not agree to 
combine his Diplomatic Negotiations work with HumanML_Write/Report 
and that is sufficient for me to withdraw the agenda item from our 
next meeting.

Finally, because the WSIA TC is having its second round of face to 
face meetings starting April 17, 2002 in Palo Alto, CA at the 
Hewlett-Packard Labs, it may be necessary for me to ask that our 
meeting by teleconference and Yahoo IM be changed from the same date 
to one earlier or later, but I have already requested an outside 
phone line for the hour or so that we would be meeting. Because 
Ranjeeth will be in Washington D.C. at about that same time, I 
believe, it may just be wiser to change the time of our next meeting. 
So, would April 10 work for everyone? It is a week earlier, and of 
course, 12:00 p.m. Noon EST.

Note, lack of dissenting votes will constitute approval by 
acclamation, so failing to vote is a vote in favor.

Regards,
Rex Brooks
OASIS HumanMarkup TC Vice Chair, Secretary and Webmaster

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