Apologies:
This call was GK's first call as Advisory Committee Chair. He will serve in this capacity for two years.
The theme for this call was Zed Committee Transition.
There were no additions to the agenda (version 2) distributed on Wednesday evening, October 20, 2004.
Jennifer Sutton will serve as scribe for the Committee under the current arrangement with the DAISY Consortium. The current arrangement will be in effect until the end of 2004.
One of the key issues here is to balance size and participation. The group wants to give interested parties a chance to contribute ideas to the evolution of the standard, as well as to enlist additional people to help with the significant amount of work on tap. The Committee wishes to assure transparency in its work and to help those in the community to feel included.
Several approaches for recruiting new participants were proposed. The group stressed its wish to have fair representation on the Committee. It is important to balance the desire to have some participants from nonprofits and for-profit companies involved in the Committee's work.
It was agreed that the upper limit for Committee membership would be 15 or 16. Consensus seemed to be that a representative from CAST should be invited since it is critical that Z39.86-200x be in alignment with the NIMAS.
GK agreed to write an announcement to invite additional participation on the Advisory Committee. The number of slots is limited, and the announcement will make clear that Committee members must participate in a certain percentage of the calls and attend a specified number of face-to-face meetings in order to remain in good standing.
It was noted that when the Committee's membership expands, it may become especially important to plan meetings and other logistical matters carefully and in advance to assure maximum participation.
It was agreed that minutes from both teleconference calls and face-to-face meetings will be made available to the public. The idea of simply providing a summary of minutes was proposed and rejected.
As a result of this decision, the scribe will keep the broadened audience in mind and be careful to note when items are only, for example, under consideration. The Committee will need to be vigilant about reviewing minutes for accuracy. In addition, action items, deadlines, and timelines for completing work will need to be as clear and specific as possible.
There was some discussion of developing a formal published work plan containing tasks, goals, and deliverables. This plan could guide the scope of the Committee's work and the status of proposed actions. At this time, however, no specific decisions or actions came out of the discussion. This item should be carried forward.
The scribe will continue to draft and finalize the minutes. Once a work flow and procedures have been established, final minutes will be passed to NLS for posting in a space, yet to be created, on the NLS pages related to the standard.
Once a work plan is developed, it, too, will need to be posted to NLS's site in a space that has yet to be created.
The terms of Mark, Dave, and Thomas have expired. GK and MM agreed that further discussion regarding next steps for filling these positions will be taken off-line.
There has been some interest expressed in having Marisa DeMeglio join the Committee.
GK mentioned his wish to have past committee members serve in an ex officio capacity. MH indicated that he would have to discuss the matter with his employer.
MM briefed the group on the status of the proposed specification's going out for balloting. It is believed that NISO distributed it on October 21, 2004. NISO was experiencing some technical difficulties which caused the three-week delay in distribution.
Votes will be received by Monday, December 6. MM was able to persuade NISO to open a 45-day period for collecting votes and comments. If there are a lot of questions, the work may not be completed by the end of 2004.
Responses to comments from the NISO voters must be sent before the standard will be forwarded to ANSI for consideration.
Once the proposed standard is approved by NISO, it must also be approved by ANSI. In 2002, ANSI's approval only took about a week.
MM will be enlisting the aid of the Advisory Committee in responding to questions and comments.
JP, LR, and MG primarily discussed the seven outstanding bugs, as reported via SourceForge, related to ZedVal. All but one of these seven bugs has been diagnosed. LR, JP, and MG discussed the priority-level of these bugs.
LR indicated that the TestMap for the ZedVal upgrade has been begun by NLS, but a few other individuals need to review the work completed so far.
The DAISY Board has approved funding for ZedVal's next phase, and GK asked MG to continue to actively seek qualified programmers to help with the project. It was agreed that some of the less critical bugs may be postponed until the human resources to do the work are in place.
MH mentioned the idea of implementing the "check for the latest upgrade" feature so that the software would go online to check its status. It was agreed that this idea could be considered in the longterm.
Scribe's Note: Perhaps it would be a good idea to put this forward via SourceForge.
The next conference call of the Advisory Committee will be held on Wednesday, November 3, 2004 from 9:00 – 10:00 EST. This means 7:00 Mountain, 9:00 Eastern, 14:00 UK, and 15:00 Copenhagen and Stockholm.
Time: 9:00 – 10:15 EST
Venue: telcon
Scribe: Jennifer Sutton
Last Edited: 2004-11-04
Status: Version 3 – added "id"s