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Subject: PAC: Issue CS 6 (Language communities)
To: workprocess@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: PAC: Issue CS 6 (Language communities) A while ago I noted the connection between tag languages and natural languages, and I raised the issue of how we allow different language communities to operate under this process. http://xml.org/archives/workprocess/msg00220.html I said then: 5. I suggest the term "language of reference" to designate any of the set of languages recognized by OASIS for the creation of OASIS technical specifications. Since OASIS is a Pennsylvania non-profit corporation that conducts its business in English, the bootstrap language of reference is English. A recognized language of reference is simply one into which the Rules of Order for OASIS Committees has been translated. The OASIS board (or maybe the whole membership) decides when a language of reference has been established by a satisfactory translation and determines that resources are available to maintain a minimum level of support for the foreseeable future. Translation is hard, but if the process itself is well designed (i.e., based on models known to work) then translation needs to be done rarely. The cost of translation will tend to discourage frequent modification of the process, which is probably a good thing. Translation doesn't need to be done right away, which is a very good thing. We could probably get along for a couple of years on just English, Japanese, and Chinese, and I'm fairly confident that we can get someone to do the first two translations if we keep the size down and run some committees under the English version for a year or so to debug it first. 6. I see no immediately evident harm in continuing to allow votes on approving OASIS standardization to be votes of the whole membership for specifications written in even the most obscure language of reference as long as (a) the membership has approved the establishment of that language of reference and (b) the rules are constructed in such a way as to allow a relatively low number of votes for approval. This last part can be tricky, and I'm not quite sure how to proceed with it. This becomes part of the whole question of how to approve OASIS standards, which I suggest that we consider separately from the question of whether we have to write our own committee process. I still think that these suggestions are a good ones as far as they go. At the time I wrote the passages above, I believed that we would have to write our own process rules from scratch and have those rules translated into each "language of reference." Now I think that we can get away with writing a committee manual (which I suspect we will have to do anyway) and point to Robert's as the normative reference for the hard cases. Then the procedure for some language community not previously recognized by OASIS would be: 1. Form a translation committee (see issue CT 7) using the generic procedure for TCs. 2. Translate the committee manual into the candidate language of reference. 3. Approve the translation (details TBD). 4. Approve the new language of reference. 5. Allow TCs to be formed that use this language of reference, the normative process remaining the English version of Robert's. The downside to this plan would be that someone would have to write the committee manual. This now looks a lot harder to do than I thought it would be six months ago. On the other hand, it may be possible to automate the process; if that turns out to be the case, then we could just localize the interface. (Yes, I know it's hard to localize an interface, but I think it's not as hard as translating the process.) The alternative (I think) is to allow the formation of geographical divisions of OASIS and let each one define its own process. But then we have the problem of how to be sure that approval of a specification meets the same criteria in one language as in another. Let's talk about this Thursday. Jon
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