The OASIS Process for Structured Information Standards
OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is a nonprofit corporation founded in 1993 under the name SGML Open. Originally a consortium of small software vendors and large customers devoted to developing guidelines for interoperability among SGML products, OASIS changed its name in 1998 to reflect the inclusion of CGM Open and the growing popularity of the XML subset of SGML.
In 1999 OASIS began two important projects -- the XML registry/repository at XML.org and, in cooperation with UN/CEFACT, the Electronic Business XML (ebXML) initiative. It also changed its membership rules to include individual members as well as corporate sponsors. Today OASIS is an organization in transition, whose future direction depends largely on the extent to which interested individuals decide to participate.
The process by which OASIS develops information standards is also in transition. The overall structure of OASIS is that of an ordinary nonprofit corporation with an elected board of directors. The board is responsible for business and policy decisions, while the membership itself is responsible for deciding substantive technical issues such as the approval of interoperability guidelines. As would be expected in what was historically an industrial consortium, "membership" for purposes of electing the board and voting on technical resolutions includes just the organizational members, with one vote going to each organization. More will be said about the relationship of organizational and individual members below.
Robert's Rules of Order
As a nonprofit corporation, OASIS is bound by law to follow the procedures set forth in its corporate charter and bylaws. The OASIS bylaws, like those of most U.S. corporations, specify Robert's Rules of Order as the procedure to be followed by the OASIS board of directors and by committees created by the board. Thus, adherence to Robert's is a requirement imposed by law. This means, among other things, that members can seek legal relief if their rights are not respected under the traditional parliamentary process specified by Robert's.
While potentially complex and sometimes tedious, the Robert's process has a number of advantages for an organization devoted to the development of industrial standards. As the synthesis of some four centuries of evolution in parliamentary procedure, it is the epitome of majority rule in practice. It has been thoroughly debugged and tested under just about every conceivable set of circumstances; it is built into most of our governmental and corporate institutions; its documentation is very widely available (see below for further information); and perhaps most importantly, it can continue to function even when resolving questions about which there are deeply opposed points of view. It is not surprising, therefore, that Robert's is the process used by ANSI, IEEE, and a number of other highly regarded standards organizations.
Robert's also has some disadvantages, but they are not the kind that some people imagine. The widespread belief that Robert's necessarily imposes an inherently slow and difficult procedure on technical development is simply not true. Robert's rules for committee work are much more relaxed than the rules for full deliberative assemblies that most Americans learn in civics classes, and, in the hands of a knowledgeable chair, a committee running under Robert's can move just as quickly as a less structured group. It's true that the process slows down dramatically when confronted with real disagreements among the participants, but so does any process that recognizes disagreement and attempts to deal with it fairly. The difference between the traditional process and more informal ones is that the traditional process always produces a decision no matter what the level of disagreement, while less structured processes dodge the problem by appealing to a higher authority or, in the worst cases, simply ceasing to function.
The real problem with using the traditional process in standards work has to do with its quorum requirements. A quorum is the minimum number of members that have to be present before a committee can conduct business.
Under Robert's, committees are made up of particular individuals appointed by name. A committee can invite observers to participate, but it cannot add voting members, or remove voting members, or change its charter, or do anything else that might run contrary to the intention of the body that created it. So the composition of an existing committee can be changed only by formal resolution of the body that appointed the committee. There are very good reasons for this system; it ensures that committees include only those people judged qualified to carry out the work, and it prevents committees from being "stacked" by the ad hoc participation of groups with views on a particular question. But frequent personnel changes in modern companies make the staffing of technical committees by direct appointment unwieldy in practice.
One solution to this problem would be to appoint to the committee everyone who expressed interest in it and trust that enough of them would remain involved over the life of the committee to carry out its work. But here the quorum requirement intervenes. Under the default process specified by Robert's, a committee meeting has to be attended by a majority of all the appointed members in order to conduct business.
The quorum requirement is important because it prevents a small subset of members from acting in the name of the committee and thus ensures that decisions actually represent the thinking of the majority of the group. But it is a sad fact of standards work that few of the people who express initial interest in the work of a committee will ever actually attend any given meeting. This problem is exacerbated by the impossibility of substituting one person for another without the approval of the body that created the committee. The result is that a Robert's committee must consist of a relatively small number of specifically named people who are genuinely committed to attending every meeting; otherwise it will fail to achieve a quorum and will be unable to conduct business legally.
To address these and other issues related to the creation of technical committees (TCs), the OASIS board of directors has created a Process Advisory Committee (PAC) and chartered it to develop a set of changes to the OASIS bylaws that will provide for easier committee maintenance. The PAC is expected to deliver a package of proposed bylaw amendments in time for distribution at the OASIS meetings to be held in conjunction with the Paris XML Europe conference in June 2000.
Interim Procedures
In the meantime, the OASIS board, with the advice of the PAC, has created a temporary set of procedures for TCs based on the default Robert's Rules process specified by the current corporate bylaws. The complete interim procedure for the creation of an OASIS TC can be found at http://www.xml.org/archives/workprocess/msg00123.html
This complete procedure includes forms to be used at various stages of the process, which can be summarized as follows.
- To handle the creation and maintenance of TCs, the board has instituted the Advisory Committee on Technical Committees (ACTC). The ACTC is made up of one chair from each technical committee and is itself chaired by the OASIS Chief Technical Officer, a position that is at this writing held by Norbert Mikula of DataChannel.
- A group of OASIS members (individual members or employees of member organizations) wishing to create a new OASIS TC draws up a statement of purpose, proposes one or more discussion leaders, and submits to the ACTC a request for the creation of a mailing list. Under normal circumstances, the ACTC approves the creation of the list and appoints the discussion leaders named in the proposal.
- When the list is operational, the discussion leaders submit an announcement to the membership (all of the individual members and the designated representatives of all of the organizational members) stating the purpose and initial membership of the list and inviting the participation of all interested OASIS members and employees of member organizations. The announcement is forwarded to the general membership list. Discussion on the new list begins a week or so after the announcement.
- After everyone interested has had a chance to join the list, the discussion leaders post to the list a statement of purpose for the proposed TC, a proposed TC meeting schedule, a list of proposed deliverables, and the names of the proposed chair. The decision of whether to determine these parameters in advance or work them out on the mail list is up to the discussion leaders. Then they call upon those members of the list who agree with its proposed purpose, deliverables, and chair and who can commit to attending the meetings to nominate themselves to be the voting members of the committee.
- After another week or so to give people a chance to respond, a list of the names of those who committed to attending TC meetings according to the proposed schedule is submitted to the ACTC. The ACTC can, in theory, create TCs with any membership it likes, but typically it will create a TC composed of the list as submitted and will appoint the chair named in the proposal.
- Coincident with its creation of the new TC, the ACTC requests the OASIS board of directors to add the chair of the new TC to the ACTC so that every OASIS TC is represented on the ACTC.
- Once created, a TC runs according to the default process specified in the OASIS bylaws, which of course is Robert's. New members can be added to the TC, but only by resolution of the ACTC.
It should be obvious that the process just described won't scale gracefully to a very large number of TCs. The PAC chose the simplest procedure it could devise that would work for a few months and still be completely legal according to the OASIS bylaws.
