From owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org Fri Sep 14 13:38:34 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:34:28 -0400 From: "Mason, James David (MXM)" Subject: RE: INCITS-V1: Comments on the comments? In-reply-to: <46EAD077.5030205@durusau.net> Sender: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org To: incits-v1@incits-v1.org Reply-to: incits-v1@incits-v1.org X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5 X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by midtown.nycx.com id l8EKZdna011654 Content-class: urn:content-classes:message Thread-topic: INCITS-V1: Comments on the comments? Thread-index: Acf2/Im/OewrUo1iToSm0uuWyVtF9AADuXrA X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 14 Sep 2007 20:34:41.0237 (UTC) FILETIME=[AD4BB050:01C7F70E] I'll add another anecdote to Patrick's. Right now in Knox County, Tennesse, we're in the middle of a very messy lawsuit against the county because some members of the County Commission (the county legislative body) seem to have engaged in some back-room deals in selecting replacements for some other members who had been elected but then thrown out because the courts said they were term limited (the subject of another messy lawsuit). The point of the current lawsuit is that Tennessee law says all deliberation must be handled in public, not the smoke-filled back room (or the men's room, to be specific about one count of the suit). What does this have to do with V1? Simply that we, too, are required to conduct our deliberations in a way that is open to public scrutiny. And, yes, we, too, can be sued if someone thinks we aren't sufficiently open about how we make decisions. Standards committees in this country not only can be sued, they have been sued, and judgments have been levied against them because some party felt their rights were abused by committee actions. When I joined V1, at its first meeting, ANSI-sponsored committees still listed their membership in categories that included "public interest" in addition to "industry" and "government". Indeed, I represented the Society for Technical Communication in V1, in addition to representing my agency. Furthemore, because my participation is supported by the taxpayers' money, I must make public any discussions to which I am party unless they involve classified or proprietary information (neither of which should appear in V1) unless I want to be subject to a FOIA lawsuit. So we can't hide our dirty laundry: everything, including our mistakes, must be open to public scrutiny. James D. Mason, Ph.D. Y-12 National Security Complex U.S. Department of Energy (I could add to Patrick's accounts of scholarly navel contemplation and withdrawal if I wanted to; I've been there. Suffice it to say that I wrote a dissertation on werewolves, and my eBay handle is an Old Icelandic word that means "one who walks after death". And one of my high-school friends was studying one of those U of C courses on heiroglyphics when we were sophomores back in 1959.)