Unresolved Issues

Organizational Structure

• Should TDWG have an officer charged with outreach? Outreach could be tightly related to the annual meeting, but it may be significant enough that it should not get loaded onto the meeting organizers.
• The Annual Meeting committee Chair (Executive Committee) should ideally be from the agency that will host the annual meeting. They should have responsibility to co-opt members from TDWG and their agency to support the planning and operation of the meeting.
• We do not yet have the Newsletter Editor position converted into the Web master
• We do not have any specification for the establishment and management of the collaboration infrastructure. We do not have someone dedicated to perform this task.
• Should we require that Interest and Task Groups use TDWG-hosted infrastructure? [Lee: I think we need to strongly encourage that to ensure that TDWG presents a common interface to members]
• Membership: There was some discussion about having no formal membership. People would effectively sign up to an Interest or Task group. If this occurs, how is the Executive Committee formed? Stan: "The essence of my argument will be that membership dues have not provided much in $, and that we will be better off to minimize the barriers to participation, and increase the the number of members by saying anyone who participates is a member".

Process

• Precise terms for specifications in the standards track (these need work):
  • working draft -- publicly accessible, but still under development;
  • draft standard -- a stable specification that has been submitted to the TAG, but not yet proposed
  • Proposed standard -- a specification placed in the repository and undergoing public review
  • TDWG Standard -- a specification that has undergone public review, and adequately addressed comments.

Other Issues

• Documentation standards: We need to establish bilateral links between the process documents and the documentation standards.

-- StanleyBlum - 09 May 2006