Re: postponed issues (was Re: Agenda for teleconference Wednesday October 24, 2007)

Ian wrote:
 > My proposal (oops) is that issues be *raised*
 > and subsequently either *accepted* or *rejected*. Once accepted, an
 > issue becomes *open* until it has been *resolved* by the WG. As I
 > understand it, all open issues will need to be resolved eventually,
 > even if the resolution is only to postpone them.



My understanding is that any (formal) comment arising from the WG or 
from outside must be formally addressed, and so the *rejection* option 
above can only be used in a way that is consistent with formally 
addressing a comment.
The issue list is a formal mechanism for comments by WG participants.

In my understanding, if a WG participant says:
[[
I have an issue with OWL 1.1 document XX because the moon is made of 
blue cheese.
]]

while this could (and should?) be rejected by the chairs, such a 
rejection needs to show a trail explaining why, and be defensible should 
the director ever be asked to examine:

e.g.

[[
Dear ???

the chairs have decided to reject your issue undiscussed since neither 
the OWL 1.1 design nor the document cited mentions the moon, or cheese, 
or any colour.

]]


in general I would expect that any bona fide issue gets some WG 
attention (even if only five minutes to formally resolve something).

If the blue cheese issue got a second, then I don't think the chairs 
could or should avoid spending WG time on it. (Fortunately, it wouldn't!)

When an issue is arising from a misunderstanding, it obviously is 
desirable that some WG participant explain the misunderstanding to the 
issue raiser to their satisfaction, and the issue is withdrawn, rather 
than rejected, and WG time is not spent on it. But in some sense most 
issues are about misunderstandings - just some misunderstandings are 
deeper than others!

Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 09:48:16 UTC