| Jugoslav Dujic 2006-09-22, 4:01 am |
| Gary Scott wrote:
| jamesgiles@att.net wrote:
|
|| Dan Nagle wrote:
|| ...
||
||| The fact that attending a meeting greatly increases
||| the chances of getting an idea into the standard isn't due
||| to J3's ignoring anyone not present. It's because the process
||| is a consensus process. If you're not present, you can't
||| defend or modify your ideas as needed to gain the consensus.
||| If you can't converse, you can't negotiate. Most papers
||| pass by Unanimous Consent. That's the result of refinement
||| and accommodating several points of view.
||
||
|| This can all probably be done faster with electronic communication
|| since you don't even have to wait for a meeting. Further, such
|| communication can be more explicit than the often praised face-
|| to-face "advantages" of being able to see and hear the eye-rolls,
|| sighs, groans, etc. of other members.
||
|
| I went back to read whether specific proposals have been made to improve
| the process. I agree with this in principle. However, usenet postings
| and email would not work. There's no configuration management, comments
| would get lost or drowned out by spam. There would need to be some sort
| of vetting process, maybe consensus acceptance or rejection of
| comments/edits (voting buttons?), methods for backing out
| unwanted/accidental changes, especially if these are direct edits to the
| standard (I probably would not go so far as direct editing of the draft
| standard, just the developmental proposals). Can you be more specific
| as to the process?
Since we mentioned Wikipedia on several occasions recently, I'd say that
its software (which is AFAIK freely available & reusable) is close to perfect
tool for the job -- for every "Project page" it has an associated "Discussion"
page. It has features for user-level access control set up by admins
(in Wikipedia they're set up very loosely by default, but it can easily be
strictened for this hypothetical purpose). And it has fairly simple markup
language (simplified HTML) for nice formatting.
Like Giles, I'm not saying that the Standard decisions should be made by
"democracy"; but more transparency and openness for suggestions of interested
parties would be definitely worthwhile.
--
Jugoslav
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