V3 Publishing ConCall Minutes 20090107

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Minutes of Recent Publishing Conference Calls

Present

Beeler, Kreisler, Lloyd, Seppala, Stechishin, Savage

Agenda

Review Minutes of December 17, 2008

Approved minutes of December 17, 2008

Issues Arising from Ballot 2009Jan

Don Lloyd informed the Group of issues that had arisen during the course of the most recently completed ballot cycle. Although all ballots met forum, there were issues that arose around "expired" memberships and the ballot close state. In particular, a number of members whose membership term formally ended on December 31 were unable to get the renewal processed in time to vote in the ballot pool but closed on January 5. Similar issues have arisen in the past.

This presents two specific problems:

1. Frustration on the part of the voters that "administrative bottlenecks" prevented their ability to vote; and
2. The prospect that the recently adopted GOM rules will make those same voters ineligible to participate in future normative ballots.

Although the Publishing Work Group understands the objective of making sure that membership has value, the timing of the HL7 January ballots each year, falling shortly after the protracted holiday break, exacerbates the problem for these cycles.

The Publishing Work Group approved a motion asking the chair to communicate to the TSC the following points for consideration:

Publishing Recommendation

• In the event that a member has registered in a ballot pool, but is unable to vote owing to the expiry of their membership, and the membership is subsequently renewed within 30 days of its expiry, that voter should not be dropped from the consensus pool for the ballot in question.
• HL7 should consider modifying the "rules" for membership voting to account for the "renewal/voting squeeze" that arises each January. A variety of rules could accomplish this. The Publishing Work Group suggests consideration of one of the following:
  • "Any member in good standing at the time they join the ballot pool, shall be allowed to cast their vote in that ballot." (At maximum, this gives them an extra 30 days in which to exercise their vote.)
  • "Any member in good standing on December 31 of a given calendar year, who has registered to vote in the ballot that closes the following month shall be allowed to cast their vote in that ballot." (In practice, this gives people somewhere between a five and 15 day grace period.)
  • "Any member in good standing on the last date the ballot pools may be joined, and who has joined a ballot pool, shall be allowed to cast their vote in that ballot." (This is a variant on the first suggestion above, with a somewhat narrower window and 30 days.)

Normative Edition 2009

There was a brief discussion of the preparations for publishing Normative Edition 2009. A preview site has been established, and Don Lloyd will circulate the URL for that site in the near future. Don emphasized that we need to continue asking the Work Groups to tell us about any new content that must be included in the forthcoming Normative Edition. They should be raised in every large group meeting in Orlando.

Woody raised the question as to which RIM should be included in this Normative Edition. He pointed out that RIM 2.24 (which will be released in the next day or so) is the first one that can be fully, and correctly represented in MIF format. For that reason, he would like to use that as the "basis" for the forthcoming Normative Edition. The only significant change that has occurred to the RIM since the September Working Group Meeting, has been the deprecation of the "negation indicator" attribute of Act, and its replacement with two new attributes. Since this does not affect prior designs, it does not preclude its use. It was pointed out further, that vocabulary changes that occurred after the September Working Group Meeting, are necessary to make some of the new Normative Edition content "correct".

As a consequence, the Publishing Work Group agreed to recommend that the most recent version of the RIM be used as the foundation for the forthcoming Normative Edition.

Status of "Unchanged" Artifacts in a Subsequent Ballot

Recently, issues have been raised when voters cast a negative ballots on previously-normative content that was not intended to be changed in a subsequent release of a domain standard. This issue first arose when the "Common Message Types" domain was opened for Release 2, in order to add new common message types. One of the voters chose to cast a negative ballot on the previously-approved normative content, and refused to accept the finding of the Work Group that this was "out of scope". More recently, similar issues have been raised about the "line-level documentation" of static models included in domains whose subsequent release is being balloted, and where the artifacts in question has not been changed.

The Publishing Work Group agreed to make the following recommendations the TSC, when it undertakes review of this issue:

Publishing Recommendation

• For Normative ballots, the Publishing Work Group believes that a Work Group should be able to exclude unchanged, previously-normative content from ballot comment in a subsequent ballot to release a subset of that domain. This exclusion would be subject to the following "rules":
  • The project scope statement under which the subsequent release is being brought forward should discuss the fact that the scope of the domain being balloted is reduced, and for what reasons;
  • The limitation of the project scope must be clearly included in the "Preface" of the domain, including a list of the unchanged artifacts that are being excluded; and
  • As the normative ballot progresses, material that has passed earlier ballots for this release without negative comment, can be added to the "excluded" content for subsequent ballots on the same release.
• For DSTU ballots, the Publishing Work Group believes that it should be possible to declare "excluded content" when the next release of the same DSTU is being balloted. (It was noted that this is less of an issue with DSTU since the ballot reconciliation rules are easier to meet for these ballots.)