Document Number: AUSTIN/26 Title: Committee Draft Development Procedures (Issue 1) Revision Date: 1999-05-04 Source: Andrew Josey, Chair Action: for information Purpose The purpose of this document is to describe the operational procedures for the Austin Group's development of committee drafts leading to production of a set of concensus documents. (An alternative title of this document, is "how the committee works without the politics"). This document defines the inputs and outputs from the scheduled committee draft reviews (see AUSTIN/23) that the group needs to produce in order to interwork with the approval processes of the participating organizations. This document does not define how the participating organizations will ballot the final concensus documents (the Joint Procedures Committee document should be consulted for further information). Document Development Procedures 1. PARTICIPATION IS ELECTRONIC. THERE IS NO PAPER. 2. Each draft shall be circulated in electronic format only (pdf/postscript with line numbers). 3. Austin Group members can download the drafts from a password protected web site (each member has an individual account and password on the Austin Group web site , so we are able to track individual accesses). 4. The comment format shall be Aardvark format. (see URL http://www.opengroup.org/austin/aardvark/ ) Tools shall be provided to generate Aardvark format comments (a C tool and a web page) 5. Drafts shall be circulated for a 6 week review period (note that the sanity review period is shorter). 6. All members of the review group have to be on the review reflector, which shall be a separate reflector to the general austin-group discussion list. The purpose of the review reflector is for submission of review comments in aardvark format, and for change request report summaries arising from a review meeting. The review reflector is not a general discussion list. Additional participants may join the review reflector at any time and participate in committee draft reviews. Upon joining the review reflector, members of the review group need to declare their affiliation, which can be IEEE - IEEE SA members. TOG - The Open Group's Base working group and Architecture Board members WG15 - authorized voting representatives from country delegations of SC22/WG15 (typically this would be heads of delegation or their proxies) Austin Group - for those who do not fall into the above categories. It is possible to have more than one affiliation. Please note that the affiliation is only significant for certain review periods that are yet to be determined. For example, if IEEE or WG15 decide to hold a ballot prior to the final concensus document, it would make sense to utilise the Austin Group review periods and review mechanism, in which case the review comments tagged as IEEE comments (see 7 below) would form the IEEE ballot. Note that the formation of the IEEE ballot pool is a separate process to the above, to be defined by IEEE. 7. All comments shall be submitted electronically to the review reflector. in the Aardvark format, including the following subject line Subject: BUG in Where can be one of XSH XCU XBD XRAT The comment field of each Aardvark submission needs to include the affiliation that the submitter believes he or she represents, note as stated in 6 above this is only significant for certain review periods: [TOG] [IEEE] [WG15] Note that the comment fields should be used to provide reference information for reviewers, and thus where possible include information such as reviewer reference and interface name, i.e. a comment on the fprintf interface from myself could be TOG-fprintf-AJJ1. The full aardvark submission format is described at http://www.opengroup.org/austin/aardvark/ All review comments shall be collated and made publically available on a web page as they come in. Reviewers should ensure that they are familiar with the detailed scope of the project when submitting comments. 8. A review meeting shall occur at the end of the review period. For those who submit comments you are urged to attend the review resolution meeting or to be available via email and/or telephone during a meeting to respond to any queries related to your review comments. [Note that this means that meeting hosts should be willing to provide telephone connectivity for voice and data communications] The meeting shall review each aardvark comment and record a disposition Accept Accept as marked below Duplicate Reject A rationale is recorded with each aardvark for rejected or partial changes. 9. After a review meeting, a change request report shall be sent back to the review reflector. 10. It is the responsibility of individual reviewers to check the change request report to find out the disposition of their individual review comments. If a reviewer disagrees with the disposition he or she should (1) either raise it with his or her Organizational representative or (2) raise it during the next draft review period. ----- Andrew Josey The Open Group Austin Group Chair Apex Plaza,Forbury Road, Email: a.josey@opengroup.org Reading,Berks.RG1 1AX,England Tel: +44 118 9508311 ext 2250 Fax: +44 118 9500110