Hi Stephen;
Unfortunately today is my last day before I planned to go away on holiday, I am returning on the second after which I think we can definitely organize an ad-hoc call to discuss any concerns you have. And indeed, I don't want to go ahead with a vote until I think your concerns are addressed.
One thing I want to make sure you're aware of - is that this is not the only document that governs the OCA. The OCA is first and foremost governed by the OASIS Open Project rules (https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/open-projects-process). These rules are quite strict as far as how actual decision making in the PGB occurs. The OCA governance document is an add-on, on top of that, whose purpose is to address how we as the OCA are going to steward our community and our open source projects (the existence of said governance document is also outlined in above mentioned rules). The governance document does not and can not supersede anything in the OP rules.
I agree we definitely need to be clear as to what the OCA is and what it is not. As it is chartered today, the OCA as an OASIS Open Project it is quite different from a SIG. An OP's primary mission is advancement of the open source projects in it's prevue, not to do interop / certifications or industry advocacy. Indeed, the OCA is not really set up to do any of those activities today (nor does it have any budget to perform them). If we wanted to do any of those things, we would all have to take a vote to increase our own dues, to create a budget to engage in those activities. We'd also need to figure out what they actually mean in the context of the OCA charter.
-
Jason Keirstead
Chief Architect - IBM Security Threat Management
www.ibm.com/security
"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure."
- Thomas J. Watson
From: "Stephen Wood" <swood@...>
To: "oca-pgb@..." <oca-pgb@...>
Date: 12/20/2019 04:12 PM
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [oca-pgb] The "Bylaws"
Sent by: oca-pgb@...
Jason,
In the spirit of being as constructive as possible, I wanted to open a conversation with you before I stir things up unintentionally.
I went over the Governance docs. Let me tell you where my head is at.
There is a philosophical divide that you need to think about. The documents are written to address an open source software project. Those are very casual and operate under the assumption that you contribute if you like where this is going and otherwise don’t.
By contrast, there is a Special Interest Group type of logic. In that case, we are here to collectively create and advocate on behalf of the industry. There are resources that are shared (money, development time). There is a need to take action on behalf of the many like forming relationships with other entities, performing interoperability testing, speaking on behalf of the group, etc. In this space, the bar goes up in terms of the organization’s level of professionalism. We have to be a lot more crisp about decision making.
In this later environment, there is usually a two part pattern of behavior (drawing from the computer and communications sectors). There is the standards development (that looks a lot like our open source activity) and then there is the SIG that represents the industry, performs interop & certification and advocates. OASIS is blending these two. That’s not a bad thing, but we need to make sure that we decide which parts of the activity are in scope and which are out.
I can dump a lot of stuff into comments, but I think I’m going to drive you nuts unless we have a shared understanding of where all of this is going. Are you going to be active early next week? Any chance we can talk before I do anything more.
FYI, Duncan’s efforts to harden voting rules is an artifact of crossing these lines. Harder rules are not needed for open source projects but they are essential to a SIG effort.
