TOC Meeting Notes
From Jini.org
Contents |
Technical Oversight Committee Meeting Notes
On Sunday a dedicated (if you will allow that euphemism) group of people got together to have the first face-to-face meeting of the Technical Oversight Committee, commonly known as the TOC. Herewith are notes from that meeting for your edification.
Note: In the following document some temporal reordering has organized comments into logical groups, where the natural flow of discussion sometimes separated them. If you want it in actual order, feel free to attend next time to get the full effect.
Welcome
Hi. Welcome. Introductions. The TOC attendance was as follows:
- Jim Waldo
- Bill Venners
- Sylvia Scheuring [by proxy via Jerome Scheuring]
- Bob Scheifler [absent with leave]
- Aleta Ricciardi
- John McKim
- Alan Kaminsky
- Cees de Groot
- Ken Arnold [your humble author]
This was an open meeting so other people from the community were also at the table. (Of particular interest was Mark Hodapp who took notes while I ran the meeting, and therefore made this document possible -- thank you, Mark.)
Review
We started with a review of our current state, the salient facts being:
- The TOC was elected at the Santa Clara meeting (third meeting) for a term of essentially six months.
- The TOC was asked to examine the following questions and propose solutions to the community
- What is a standards proposal made of?
- How do votes happen?
- Who can vote?
- What does an approval mean?
- What are the roles and responsibilities of the TOC?
- We have approved a document describing how proposals are made.
- We seem to have approved (by silence) a document describing how minor changes are made to proposals (such as grammar fixes and clarifications). To be sure that we had agreed on this we took a formal vote to approve the minor changes proposal. The vote was: 8 Yes, 0 No, 1 Absent.
- Our terms of office expire the first day of the coming meeting (that is, the next day after the TOC meeting).
Debate
Considering the last bullet, we agreed that we should ask the Amsterdam meeting to extend our terms six months, and present a plan of action for getting the remaining work completed in that time.
Cees chose this moment to announce that he had taken a new job that wasn't connected with the Jini technology, and so felt he should not seek an extension. We thanked him for his dedication and wit, and he allowed as how he would continue to be involved in discussions as an individual.
We agreed on the following list of things to do:
- Define TOC roles & responsibilities (R&R)
- Including election of members
- Much of this fall out of other documents, but not all
- Determine voting process and membership
- Do changes to the licensing model for commercial members require a rework of the rules for membership in the Commercial House?
- Do changes to the licensing model for commercial members make the Commercial House redundant, now that the commercial license is free?
- Do individuals need to register to vote? Do commercial members?
- What is the actual voting mechanism?
- The structure of the organization for the future
- Do we need a non-political dedicated professional to manage the community process (such as an Executive Director)?
- How do we transition more control to the community?
'Discussion: Constitutional Issues
We had some discussion over the issue of two houses. The current approved constitution sets up two houses in the community that vote separately: an individual's house and a commercial house. The new licensing model (as of our 1.1 release) makes executing a commercial license free and easy, where the original license required payments for trademark support. If the commercial license is free, then anyone can trivially become a commercial licensee even without any commercial interest.
So the question is whether this should change the structure of the constitution? The purpose of the original structure was to prevent either constituency from overwhelming the other. If individuals can become members of both houses easily, is there logically only one house? And if so, do we need two houses? If we do, on what basis do we separate commercial members from others?
All the above questions had proponents and detractors. After a reasonably thorough airing, we put this on the table for future resolution (see below).
Another point noted was the need for some way to amend the constitution.
The best way to describe some community processes would be a state machine, and we agreed that we shouldn't shy away from putting one into relevant documents, including the constitution. We are all geek enough to understand them (or at least have geeks available to interpret them), so we might as well use our precise descriptive tools where useful.
Discussion: Voting
Several questions were placed on the table for consideration.
- How can we have auditable votes? People who don't like an outcome need some fair way to judge whether the vote actually went against them. This particularly impacts the individuals, since the non-commercial license is a click-through so there is no auditable way to know who has actually signed that license.
- If we use registration to know who is in the individual's house, we will need to provide privacy to ensure that an individual can vote their opinion even if it would be unpopular with others (such as an employer or professor).
- How can we make sure this process doesn't become complex, tortuously political, and slow as molasses? [Some existing standards-type organizations were mentioned, but we will spare their feelings by not exposing them here.]
- Given our own job shifts, we discussed whether someone who (for example) was elected from the commercial house and then changed employers should remain on the TOC. After some interesting discussions, the conclusion was that houses elected people to the TOC, not companies. The House of X (Individual, Commercial, Sun) chooses its representatives. If the House of X is dissatisfied with one of their representatives they may recall them. If the change of jobs bothers the relevant House of X, it can recall the member. (Note that this requires a recall mechanism, but we need one anyway.)
- Can TOC members give proxies to others to vote for them?
Discussion: TOC Roles & Responsibilities
Some open questions:
- Does there need to be a GOC: Governance Oversight Committee? The TOC is the Technical oversight committee. The people who can do that work may not be the people who can make decisions about governance, etc. Perhaps a governance group (board of directors) needs to be appointed.
- How are package names assigned? In the end the approval of the community is required on a proposal that creates a new net.jini package, but presumably people would like to know in advance if they will conflict with some other group creating a proposal, or if there is even a reasonable chance that the community will accept the new package. [As an action item, I agreed to make a place on jini.org for people to register that they are thinking of using a particular package so voluntary name collision can happen.]
- We agreed that the TOC needed a Chair. It was proposed that I be the Chair, and before I could run away, the vote was: 8 Yes, 0 No, 1 Absent.
- Some concern was raised about current TOC membership. The constitution provides for three members from the individual's house, three from the commercial house, and three from the original contributor (Sun). Some people had shifted jobs since the election -- were we still representative?
Discussion: How to progress?
Current issues with making progress on these questions:
- Currently all discussion are started by Ken. Clearly this doesn't scale well.
- We made a lot of progress at this meeting. We should have more non-email meetings, including phone conferences and face-to-face meetings.
Future Tasks
In order to make progress we made two arrangements. The first was to decide a process for driving the necessary decisions to conclusion The second was to list tasks and assign owners. Decision Making Process The process is to assign each decision area a primary author and a primary reviewer. All processes will move according to the same schedule:
Decision Making Process
The process is to assign each decision area a primary author and a primary reviewer. All processes will move according to the same schedule:
| Due | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Jan | Proposal to Primary Reviewer | |
| 14 Feb | Response from Primary Reviewer | |
| 28 Feb | Revision | |
| 31 Mar | Final (within problem domain) | |
| 15 Apr | Face-to-Face TOC meeting | |
| 15 May | Proposed changes to bylaws or Constitution |
In addition, we will have phone conferences every 2-3 weeks.
All discussion and proposal posting will take place on the jini-community@jini.org list. After the direct meetings notes will be posted to the list.
| Owner | Review | Task | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ken | Aleta | Voting Process | |
| Ken | Silvia | Membership | |
| Jim | Bill | Keep two houses? | |
| Alan | Ken | Governance (roles & responsibilities) | |
| Bill | John | TOC meeting mechanisms | |
| Bill | Aleta | Amending the constitution |
These dates matter, and we all know it -- all pledged to try very hard to stick to schedule.
The First Proposal
Before the meeting, Bill suggested walking the ServiceUI proposal through the community process. At the meeting, people asked if this was to be a dry run or the real thing. We agreed that making it a real vote would be best -- the ServiceUI proposal is likely to pass, and so this will give us a chance to use the mechanisms without much controversy over the actual outcome. We can discover errors in rules and mechanics without anyone wondering who won Florida, or the like. We set a goal of starting the process on ServiceUI in July, or as soon as practicable after our governance proposals are passed. (Obviously if the governance proposals are rejected we will have other tasks in hand.)
