[802SEC] electronic attendance and doc management
Dear EC
This is being sent on behalf of the chairs of 11, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, and
22 who have been meeting to see what we can do regarding electronic
attendance and doc management. This all started because our current method
of attendance taking is broken and we have a serious problem with one of
our working groups, namely 802.11. It has grown too large to be able to
manually maintain adequate attendance records needed for obtaining and
maintaining voting rights per 802 policy and procedure. 802.11 now has
well over 500 voting members and has a regular session attendance of at
least that much if not more. Some of the rest of us have also reached a
size where we are straining to manually maintain adequate attendance
records for voting rights.
Without an electronic attendance system, it is physically impossible for
802.11 to take meaningful attendance in the time available at a
meeting. What 802.11 is currently doing is checking on a daily basis
whether a person is there. This is better than nothing but it is not giving
an adequate picture of whether the 75% participation requirement is
actually being met. The opportunity to pad the voting membership is wide
open and given the high profile activity going on in 802.11, this is not a
good situation should problems or disputes occur down the road.
We had an electronic attendance system which 11, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22
had been using and had funded out of interim meeting registration
fees. Unfortunately, since earlier this year, the system we had been using
is no longer an option for reasons which are the subject of different
discussion. We are now faced with a very bad situation, one which these
working groups should not be trying to solve on their own as this is a
problem which affects every session, not just interims and impacts
compliance with 802 P&P. Given the possible consequences of not solving
it, we feel it demands immediate attention within 802. It is our opinion
we desperately need an electronic attendance system, maintained by 802, for
the optional use by all its working groups and TAGs.
Less urgent from a non compliance to P&P point of view, but just as
critical in terms of being able to effectively conduct business, is the
need for an electronic document management system. 802.11 produces close to
2000 documents a year. 802.15 produces close to 1000. Manually providing
Document Control Numbers is not an option. Retrieving docs and info is
practically impossible without some sort of cataloging and search capabilities.
In an attempt to deal with these issues 11, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22
issued an RFP for both attendance and document management systems and have
received four responses. We will be forwarding these responses to the 802
EC for consideration and action. We think it is important that we act
quickly on this matter. Bob O, could you please add this to the EC agenda
for Monday.
Respectfully Submitted
Stuart, Bob, Mike, Steve, Jerry, Ajay, and Carl
Bob Heile, Ph.D
Chair, IEEE 802.15 Working Group on Wireless Personal Area Networks
Chair, ZigBee Alliance
11 Louis Road
Attleboro, MA 02703 USA
Mobile: 781-929-4832
Fax: 508-222-0515
email: bheile@ieee.org
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