ConCall-20070508

T3F - Transitional Technical Task Force Joint Meeting with Governance & Structure Task Force

Tuesday May 8, 2007 12:00 PM (US Eastern Time, GMT -5)

Attendance

T3F Members

Beeler, Blobel, Case, Lorenzi, McCay, Parker

S&G Task Force

Alschuler, Meyer, Shafarman, Jaffe

Discuss concerns raised at the Special BoD Meeting on 5/2/2007

Agreed partial issues list:

• CTO vis-a-vis TD Chair
  • TD Chair in re Technical Chair
• Relationship of TD to CTO, CEO and Board
• Role of TSC
• Addition of "Steering Division" for Support Committees
• Role of "Steering Divisions"
• Composition of TD
• etc. etc. etc.

Discussion was productive, and started from the points taken in the e-mail thread that proceeded this meeting. We did not seek formal consensus (votes), but began to coalesce around the following:

• Making the TD Chair an elected member of the TD can work, but only if the mission statement and responsibilities of both the TD and the CTO recognize that consensus operation between their "offices" is essential to the health and progress of HL7.

If the circumstance arises where the CTO is representing a strong position that the TD cannot support, then all parties need to review their own positions using understanding of:

the rationale of each,

the CEO's directions that affected the CTO's position, and

the Board's directions that informed the CEO's position.

Simply disagreeing-to-disagree is a no-win posture.

• There are a number of "tactical decisions" that the current By-laws assign directly to the Technical Chair of HL7. These include such things as:
  • "Interpreting" the HL7 specifications to resolve issues that may arise externally or internally
  • Approve certain types of work-items for ballot
  • Over-riding the substantivity rule to allow ballots to proceed from Committee to Membership ballot even with substantive changes

Clearly, these items take time, attention to detail, and quick response that could effectively be done by the CTO. The discussion was mixed as to whether these should be assigned to the CTO a priori or whether they should be delegated by the TD and/or the TD Chair.

• Question of where the TD "reports" was seen as primarily a question of how the TD is represented on the Board as it makes strategic decisions, and how readily the TD can gain insight as to the Board's "intent" or preferences in implementing those strategies.
• Replacing TSC roles with TD functions has not been carefully delineated in the current T3F proposals. In particular, the channels of communication across "SD's" and between SDs need to be be carefully defined and nurtured so that proposals/issues arising in one SD are known to the co-chairs in other SDs, in time for them to propose alternative solutions or to discuss "difficult" decisions before they are made. The TSC venue allows some of that and allowed much more of it in the past. (Example is the formation of a new group that, if typical, will impinge on a number of groups, usually in different SDs.)

Next Meeting

Agreed to another Joint Meeting at noon Eastern, on Tuesday May 15, and T3F will convene a conference call on Friday, May 11 at 9 Eastern