Mitch.Bradley@ENG.SUN.COM (04/25/91)
I have been reviewing Robert Berkey's recent posting accusing the X3 X3 organization and the X3J14 committee of fraudulent behavior. From my reading, the arguments boil down to 2 claims: 1) X3 is guilty of selecting a vendor as the Chair of the X3J14 committee, in conflict with the desire (c.f. Robert's Rules of Order) that the Chair be a neutral party. It is further claimed that most of the X3J14 officers represent vendors. 2) X3J14 is behaving fraudulently in wishing to forward Basis 15 to the dpANS stage, despite the opinion of many committee members that the document is not ready to become an ANS standard. Here are my beliefs with respect to these claims: 1) X3 can only select a Chair from among those people who apply for the position. From my understanding, there weren't many volunteers. The vendor/non-vendor issue is presumably not the only decision criterion. Several important officers are not vendors. For example, neither of the editors are vendors. I have been told by a man who has chaired numerous IEEE committees that the editor is the most powerful officer of a technical standards committee. The Chair in question, Elizabeth Rather, has been trying to find somebody to take over the Chair for at least 5 months now. The response has been underwhelming. Who do you think X3 is going to pick if there is only one applicant. 2) The "not ready for ANS" feeling is mostly confined to concerns about the wording and layout of the document. There is overwhelming consensus that the technical issues are pretty much resolved, except perhaps for third- order issues. The committee wishes to achieve a complete standard as soon as possible, and feels that the most valuable input at this point will come not from additional committee tweaking, but from public review. Personally, I don't think it is fraudulent to send it out for public review in its "not quite perfect, but pretty close to correct" form. On the contrary, I think it is perfectly sensible to do so. At some point in the life of every project, you have to stop tweaking the design and ship it. Basis 15 is ready for "Beta testing", which means that outside people get to beat on it, with the intention that most things won't change, and a few minor problems will get corrected before final product shipment. Mitch.Bradley@Eng.Sun.COM