OASIS Election and Voter Services Technical Committee

Face-to-Face with Teleconference Meeting Minutes

July 24, 2001, 11 AM Eastern Daylight Savings Time

 

Face-to-Face Attendees in Garden City, New York

Gregg McGilvray, election.com, Chairman

Anwar Choudhury, UK e-Envoy

John Boras, UK e-Envoy

TJ Rainsford, IFES

 

Teleconference Attendees

Tim Bovee, Associated Press (IPTC)

Tracy Lewin, election.com

Deborah Phillips, Voting Integrity Project

Kathy Procope, Accenture

Dan Ryan, Accenture

Krishna Sankar, Cisco Systems

Karl Best, OASIS (observer)

 

Previous Meeting’s Minutes

No additions or changes to the previous meeting’s minutes (which can be found at  http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/election/oasis_tc_minutes_20010612.shtml) were made.

 

Chat Room

Gregg mentioned the possibility of having a chat room for the committee.  He noted that email discussions can be confusing.  Karl Best indicated that OASIS currently has no chat room capability.  Anwar noted that the UK e-Envoy’s office might be able to sponsor a chat room.  Karl said that would be ok, as long as the discussions were archived and accessible to the public.

 

Scope of Charter

Gregg indicated that the original intent of the committee was the interchange of data related to items such as ballots, voters, and election results.  Some of the discussions on the email list, he noted, have veered off on different tangents such as security.  Gregg went on to suggest that if we focus more on data, we might be able to produce our deliverables sooner.  This in turn would generate more interest in the committee.

 

Later in the meeting, the committee agreed that the first deliverables schedule should be altered according to the schedule below.

 

Phase I

XML Schemas for the following areas:

Ballot Delivery

Vote Returns

Election Notification

Voter Application

New Voter Registration

Results Reporting

Committee Statement for the following area:

                Security

 

The deliverables will be ready for OASIS vote September 14th.

 

Previously, security, authentication, authorization, auditing, and accessibility were part of the first deliverable scheduled for November 15th.  The committee decided that it would be best to focus mostly on the XML schemas rather than on issues that are not directly related to data interchange.  The committee decided that our thoughts on security should be noted, as they will be built upon in the future.

 

The committee agreed with Dan’s suggestion that ultimately the schemas should probably be registered with such repositories as xml.org and biztalk.org.  Anwar suggested the govtalk repository and to ultimately tie the committee’s work with the w3c.

 

Gregg will send an email to the mailing list so those committee members that didn’t attend the meeting can vote on the new deliverables.

 

Name and Address Information

Tracy asked whether the committee should make use the names and addresses OASIS Customer Information Quality committee.  He noted that it was a very rich definition, but that parsing people in that format is very difficult.  Dan noted that the committee is doing great work, but that the membership of the committee is somewhat small.  Anwar noted that the UK has schemas for name and address.

 

Glossary

Gregg noted that we need to develop a glossary of terms, particularly for the definition of data elements.  This will help reduce confusion arising from language and cultural differences.  Krishna volunteered to take responsibility of the glossary.  He suggested that members send glossary suggestions have “[Glossary]” in the header.

 

Links

The committee discussed recent reports by the FEC and other organizations that are related to the work of the committee.  Greg indicated that he would create links to these documents on the committee’s web site (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/election/index.shtml). 

 

Expanding Committee Membership

The committee discussed various organizations and election officials whose membership would be beneficial to the committee.

 

Action Items

Gregg will send an email to the mailing list so those committee members that didn’t attend the meeting can vote on the new deliverables.

 

Anwar will provide name and address schemas used in the UK.

 

Tracy will work with Dan on releasing XML Schemas to the committee.

 

Members will try to recruit new members to the committee.

 

Next Meetings

All meetings will be at 11:00 Eastern Time.  Next teleconference meeting will be August 21st.  The next face-to-face meeting will be September 14th, location to be determined.  Possible sites for the meeting discussed include Washington, DC and London.