Meeting-20080914

TSC - Technical Steering Committee

Sunday, September 14, 2008 6:00 PM (US Pacific Time)

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Attendance

Expected

• CTO: John Quinn
• Domain Experts: Jim Case (primary), Austin Kreisler (alternate)
• Foundation & Technology: Ioana Singureanu (primary), Woody Beeler (alternate)
• Structure & Semantic Design: Calvin Beebe (primary), Gregg Seppala (alternate)
• Technical & Support Services: Ken McCaslin (primary), Helen Stevens Love (alternate)
• Affiliate: Frank Oemig,
• ARB Chair: Charlie Mead
• HQ: Karen Van Hentenryck

invited

• Charles Jaffe (CEO); Ed Hammond (HL7 Chair); Chuck Meyer (HL7 Vice Chair); Ed Tripp (newly elected TSC member to take office Jan. 2009); Ravi Natarajan (newly elected TSC member to take office Jan. 2009)

Agenda

1. (5 min) Meeting Admin
   1. Roll Call - The following individuals were in attendance: John Quinn, John Koisch, Calvin Beebe, Ken McCaslin, Woody Beeler, Frank Oemig, Ed Hammond, Jim Case, Jane Curry, Ravi, Gregg Seppala, Austin Kreisler, Ioana Singureanu, Helen Love, Charlie McCay, Charlie Mead and Karen Van Hentenryck
2. Continued discussion - Enterprise Architecture deliverable - J. Koisch reported on the communication plan for the Enterprise Architecture project. The ArB has drafted a vision, timeline, milestones, discussed stakeholders, socialization, etc. They believe that the SAEAF represents a framework that can yeild measurable efficiences in terms of the development and adoption of standards. He reviewed the timeline, which includes peer review and engagement of groups within HL7. The ArB feels there is a requirement for another set of out-of-cycle meetings between now and the Jan 2009 WGM. One of those will be a face-to-face, the other two can be virtual meetings (calls) for vetting/feedback. By Jan 2009 they hope to deliver an impact analysis, provide education and deliver drafts of the documents for comment, with finalization of the document slated for the May 2009 WGM. They believe several work groups will wish to to be early adopters of this work and there will be ArB outreach to those who are interested. Koisch noted that many of the TSC issues discussed yesterday might have a different answer given the enterprise architecture. Beeler suggested convening a joint meeting in Jan 2009 with MnM, publishing and other core groups to determine how to convert the current material to the new architecture. The ArB has discussed having the SAEAF and other documents completed by early November. Mid to late November is therefore the appropriate date for the face-to-face meeting. McCay feels the TSC should develop a presentation on this work. Stakeholders include work groups, vendors, the larger community, other SDOs and contracting offices. The potential impacts include:
   • potential realignment of work groups
   • alignment of processes for work products across specifications
   • quality critera for ballot participation and progression
   • enhancement and refinement of conformance framework for V3 to incorporate SOA concerpts
   • backwards compatibiity considerations of SAEAF principles on existing specifications and work in progress. All impacts should be discussed if not addressed by January. Beeler suggested speeding adoption i.e., if things don't make sense stop doing them now. There was general consensus that the ArB should proceed with the Unified Field Theory and that is should become the HL7 architecture, not just the HSSP architecture. The TSC members are committed to moving to an enterprise architecture. They are still looking at the details of the document but support the change. The message must be based on the shared vision of the community. The first step is sharing the message; the second step is sharing the document and the full slide deck. The documents will be available within the next two weeks. The documents will be available on the ArB wiki. We also need to generate a communications plans so people know what will be available when and what type of feedback we need and when, etc. The same message will be provided at the Monday evening co-chairs meeting and the Tuesday general session report from the TSC Chair or CTO. The group decided to have a TSC sponsored session on Wednesday Q 3-4 at the January 2009 meeting to review the architecture with INM, MnM, SOA and other core groups.
3. Roadmap, WG 3-year plans and SWOTs - The TSC analyst will be tasked with compiling data from these reports. Once the Roadmap becomes available we can make the appropriate connections between the Roadmap and the WG documents.
4. Resource issues - H. Love suggested professionalizing the co-chairs. There is generally a lack of resources and proviing administrative support to the work groups would be beneficial. McCay feels that we need to provide value. Love suggested the following proposal: (a) train co-chair, (b) recruit secretaries for critical work groups. McCaslin feels that having multiple co-chairs is the way to ensure that minutes are captured. Scribes don't need to attend the WGMs as most of the work is done on conference calls. McCay feels we need to better market the value of engaging with HL7. ACTION ITEM: HQ to explore what it would take to provide secretarial support for 2 hours of every 1 hour conference call. Stevens-Love also suggested making co-chair training mandatory.
5. Project Template approvals - The vote on this issues will be pushed to Tuesday
6. Demos for tooling work in progress - Jane Curry introduced the topic, reporting that the tooling committee invited open source tools vendors to demonstrate at this meeting. The Tooling committee is reviewing tools that could be used for HL7 purposes and thus they have asked some vendors to demonstrate their products. We have a wide diversity of tools vendors--from independently designed commercially available tools on one end to totally open source, "use as is" tools on the other end (and including everything in between). The Board has had a long standing rule that there will be no vendor demonstrations at HL7 meetings and yet the tooling committee is trying to get a sense, via demonstrations, of the tools that are available. Charlie Mead indicated that NCI has had similar discussions but there isn't time to discuss it this evening. ACTION ITEM: This will be added to the TSC issue list and should be resolved before the next WGM.
7. Legal right to use HL7 vocabulary in non-HL7 specifications - This discussion will be moved to Tuesday.
8. New business - Charlie Mead raised the issue of the role of formal analysis. This is an issue that either needs to be addressed by the ArB or taken on by the TSC.

Call adjourned at 8:06 pm PT