LegalXML Member Section's Intentions to Continue

Dear Mr. Liscia & the OASIS Board:
Please consider this email a formal response to the email received by the Legal XML steering committee on October 2, 2010 from Laurent M. Liscia informing the steering committee that the OASIS Board had passed “RESOLUTION 2010-10-12.08, Prohibit Legal XML member section from making any further spending commitments until they have convinced the Board that they are a going concern”.



With resounding agreement among the LegalXML member section, as evidenced through a significant amount of email discussion, side discussion, and most recently in a joint conference call between the LegalXML Steering Committee and the Court Filing Technical Committee, we indeed believe the member section is a "going concern" and plans to continue to be an active member section moving forward. This year, the LegalXML steering committee has in fact, as evidenced in our meeting minutes, been active and considering items such as budget requests and expenditures, and in considering outreach efforts for our current TC, and for LegalXML in general. Our participation in the Stanford Law presentation on Standards in Open Government in November, 2010 is further evidence our continued efforts to promote LegalXML.



The steering committee, given the recent withdrawal of the ABA's OASIS membership and our current steering committee membership of only three individuals, will be reviewing the LegalXML Rules of Procedure (ROP) and will update it accordingly to ensure that it reflects the steering committee's intentions moving forward. Additionally, in our next committee meeting we will be considering the 2011 budget, and discussing potential areas for new LegalXML TC's to form and how we can be a catalyst to new TC formation. Our hope is that OASIS staff can be of assistance in that effort.



Our membership has already defined several areas to explore, including the following:


Electronic DiscoveryGlobal Justice Reference Architecture (JRA) specifications (based on NIEM and the OASIS SOA-RM)


Implementation and enforcement of privacy policies (based on the XACML and the Global Privacy Technology Framework specification)


LegalRuleML, in conjunction with a larger initative called PolicyRuleML,  focused to model rules inside of the legal documents for supporting business, check compliance, payment security, online services, privacy, connection with other XML standards (also in OASIS) oriented to the business and administrative processes


Open Legal Data, in conjunction with TGF, for supporting the reusability of the legal data and in the meantime to guarantee the peculiarity of legal domain (e.g. legal knowledge, meaning of the references, authoritativeness, legality, preservation over the time, etc.) according with Tim Bernard Lee (TED2009 and TED2010) and Obama (2009 Directives) goals


ParliamentXML is another potential issue to investigate, also Obama administration started to use XML for the bill and for GPO, as well as the European Parliament and the United Nations (eParliament world conference).


JudgmentXMLAdditionally, the ECF TC has specifically identified upcoming work it must attend to, which includes but is not limited to the following:


For the remainder of 2010 and into 2011, the ECF TC will continue TA and outreach activities to promote adoption of the ECF specifications for electronic court filing implementations,


In 2011, the ECF TC is planning a face-to-face meeting for work on updates to the specification (including minor corrections and updates based on feedback received from implementations; and maybe also mapping changes to utilize elements in the new family domain of NIEM 2.1).  TA and outreach activities will also continue throughout 2011.


Though precise timing is not yet determined, we are expecting NIEM 3.0 to be released in 18 to 24 months (probably sometime in 2012).  This new version of NIEM is expected to include significant changes that will require a major version release of ECF.


It is with all due respect that the LegalXML Steering committee request that the OASIS Board consider this email as evidence of our intention to continue our efforts, to be considered a "going concern", and that the budget freeze placed upon the LegalXML member section by RESOLUTION 2010-10-12.08 be lifted.



Thank you so much for your time and consideration. The LegalXML Steering Committee looks forward to the Board's response.



-- 
George W. Knecht
PC Intellect LLC
602.380.8049