PAR approval critiera adopted at April IEEE/CS TCOS SEC meeting

[John S. Quarterman]

From: jsq at usenix.org (John S. Quarterman)

At the January meeting of the IEEE/CS TCOS SEC (the group that approves
new standards projects for the IEEE Computer Society), 11 new PARs
(Project Authorization Requests) were approved.  This led to a bit of
a reaction at the April meeting, last week in Snowbird, Utah.  All of
the Institutional Representatives and various industry representatives
pointed out that 11 PARs might be a few too many.  This led to the formation
of an ad hoc committee to solve the problem.  The immediate result was a
list of criteria that should be examined for each PAR.  Here they are,
as supplied by the TCOS SEC chair, Jim Isaak.  Incidentally, not all
PARs submitted at the April meeting were approved; all PARs submitted
were examined after these criteria were accepted by the SEC.

John S. Quarterman, USENIX Institutional Representative to IEEE/CS TCOS SEC.


							TCOS SEC N165
                        Criteria for PAR Approval       April 25, 1990

                   SEC ad hoc committee on PAR Approval
	[approved at April 25 meeting, clarification/revision expected]

Criteria should be assumed to apply to all PARs.  PARs which a submitter
believes are exempt from certain criterion should state the reasons for
such an exemption during the PAR submission process.  If such an exception
requests that a PAR be approved when there is not an existing body of work,
the submitter must indicate why preliminary work should not be done in
another forum first, and then moved into a TCOS sponsored work group.

The following criteria will be applied by the TCOS SEC to all PARs
submitted for consideration of sponsorship:

1.   There must be existing industry experience which represents a
     substantive portion of the scope of the PAR.

2.   There must be a base document with community support from which the
     work can be started.  If there are several documents, then there must
     be evidence of the willingness of the affected parties to work
     together to generate a single standard.

3.   The scope of work must specify a realistic set of objectives,
     attainable by the specified completion date.  Note that the completion
     date must be within a window which allows the produced standard to be
     accepted and useful.

4.   The PAR must specify work which will attain a comparable level of
     acceptance and use as work already completed by TCOS.

5.   For PARs affecting approved standards, a plan for coordination and
     integration of the work must be established.  Extensions or
     modifications to approved standards should only be made after careful
     consideration of the impact on the community which relies on these
     stable, approved standards.  PARs which propose extensions or
     modifications must indicate the other TCOS standards work which they
     will affect.

6.   Submitters of a PAR must exhibit the communities commitment to
     participate in the work.  These particpants must include a viable core
     of administrative personnel (a Chair, a Secretary, and a Technical
     Editor), as well as a sufficient number of technical experts
     representing a reasonable balance of viewpoints.

7.   The PAR's proposed scope of work must be within the scope of TCOS
     activities.

8.   The timeframe for the work specified in the PAR must be appropriate
     given the impact it will have on TCOS resources (e.g. core personnel
     from other active TCOS work groups, meeting space, etc...).

9.   The submitter of a PAR must draft an addendum to the applicable
     section of the POSIX.0 document, including information on the
     requirements of the work.  In the case of a PAR for Application
     Environment Profiles this text could be used as their "base document".
     (See requirement 2).

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Volume-Number: Volume 19, Number 97