Standing Committee on Standards and Processes
Successor of the IVOA Standards & Processes Working Group
Membership:
Francoise Genova (chair),
Christophe Arviset,
Bob Hanisch
History summary
The Executive Board of the IVOA decided to form the Standing Committee on Standards and Processes (2007 Fall Interop meeting, Cambridge, UK), to review and maintain the processes of the IVOA. This committee succeeds the Standards & Processes Working Group, which was officially disbanded at the May 2005 IVOA Executive Committtee meeting but de facto continued its activities to maintain the standards and documents acceptance process.
Charter
Rationale: The Standards and Process Working Group was created at the inception of the IVOA with the goal to define the standards definitions and promotion processes that would be used by the IVOA. This goal was accomplished in 2004, and in May 2005 the IVOA Executive decided to disband the Working Group. From time to time, however, clarifications and minor revisions are needed to the previously agreed upon processes. There is not sufficient work associated with these revisions to warrant reestablishment of a Working Group.
Charter: The responsibilities of the Standing Committee on Standards and Processes are to review and update IVOA processes in response to the needs of the IVOA community. When such updates necessitate the revision of an IVOA standard, the same processes apply to the review and promotion of that standard as when the revisions originate with a Working Group, with the chair of the Committee playing the same role as the chair of a Working Group.
Membership: The members will serve three year terms. Renewals are subject to the same guidelines as for Working Group and Interest Group chairs and deputy chairs.
Standards & Processes documents
IVOA promotion processes: Standards, Guidelines and Procedures
- The current version of the IVOA Document Standards (V1.0, 24 October 2003) is here. This document describes the types of official IVOA documents and the process by which documents are advanced from Working Drafts to formal Recommendations. See also the companion Note on Document Standards Management: Guidelines and Procedures (V1.0, 25 April 2004).
- (February 2008) The current Working Draft is an update of the current standard
Software License
IVOA Document Location
All the IVOA documents can be found
here.
The directory contains subdirectories for each different document type:
Additional information on the work of the IVOA Standards & Processes Working Group (2002-2005)
Working Group Chair
The Working Group chair was
Bob Hanisch.
Document Promotion Process Checklist (May 2005)
Here is a summary of the document promotion process as described in
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/DocStd.html.
- Working Group prepares Working Draft and submits to Document Coordinator for posting in the IVOA document collection.
- Working Group reviews the Working Draft. Two reference implementations of any associated software are recommended.
- The Chair of the Working Group, with consent of the WG, promotes the document to a Proposed Recommendation and submits it to the Document Coordinator for posting in the IVOA document collection.
- The Chair of the Working Group issues a formal Request for Comments (RFC) to the e-mail distribution list interop@ivoa.net. The RFC and all comments must be logged on a TWiki page whose URL is given in the RFC. A minimum comment period of 4 weeks must be allowed. See the example below.
- The Working Group Chair responds to comments on the TWiki page. If comments lead to significant changes to the document, the status reverts to Working Draft (back to Step 1).
- If comments are addressed to the satisfaction of the WG Chair and WG members, the WG Chair requests the IVOA Chair to submit it to the Executive Committee for approval.
- The Executive Committee is polled by the IVOA Chair to ascertain if there is consensus for promotion to Recommendation.
- If yes, the IVOA Chair reports on approval to the WG Chair and asks the Document Coordinator to update the document status to Recommendation. If no, the concerns of the IVOA Executive need to be resolved and a new poll taken, or if serious revisions are required, the document would revert to Step 1.
- The IVOA Executive may propose to the IAU Commission 5 that IVOA Recommendations be endorsed as IAU Standards.
Here is a sample RFC:
e-mail to:
interop@ivoa.net
from: Bob Hanisch, chair of Document Standards Working Group
This is a Request for Comments on the Better Style Proposed Recommendation, Version 1.0, which we wish to promote to Recommendation.
The TWiki page for comments is
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/viewauth/IVOA/IVOABetterStyle
and the deadline for comments is 28 June 2005.
Please post all comments on the TWiki page rather than replying to this e-mail.
Thanks,
Bob
WG Roadmap
This Working Group developed the document standards promotion process (following generally the procedure used by the W3C) and provided guidelines on document preparation, formatting, and version numbering. See the October 2003 Recommendation "IVOA Document Standards V1.0" (
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/cover/DocStd-20031024.html) and April 2004 Note "Document Standards Management: Guidelines and Procedures V1.0" (
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/DocStdProc.html).
With the addition of the above Checklist the task of this Working Group is concluded and, with the May 2005 meeting of the IVOA Executive, this WG has been disbanded. It de facto continued its activities until the creation of the Standing Committee on Standards and Processes in September 2007.
Mailing-list
- General working-group discussion archive.
License-generic.html