Hi folks,
Steve and I have been working through and finished (to the extent we can) the preparations of the documents needed for the public review of the Humboldt Extension. The idea is that the basic entry point to the review would be
this landing page and that everything to review would be accessible from there.
We need the Task Group to finalize all documents to be included and to authorize the Darwin Core Maintenance Group to initiate the review. When authorized, the Darwin Core Task Group will send a message introducing the submission and how people should review it. It would be great to have a brief statement presenting the proposal from the Task Group to have at the beginning of that message. The DwC Maintenance Group will also solicit the TDWG Outreach folks to publicize the public review via various channels and social media. Anyone will be welcome to further publicize it in any community that TDWG misses.
The issue of new terms for by-catch came up late in last Wednesday's meeting after several people had to leave. I don't feel comfortable including anything official from that conversation without the Task Group making decisions. There are a few reasonable options.
The first option for the "by-catch" terms is to add those terms now and include them in the proposal. That means work up front to make sure the terms are well-defined and thought through. Think of this ratification process very much as if it was the publication of a manuscript with peer review. As such, an important goal is to try to avoid avoidable public discussion, which has the potential to slow things down or even derail ratification.
A second option might be to propose the new terms during public review and see if there is buy-in. This strategy is likely to make the ratification process slower, and runs a risk (that I might be inventing) that if such an added proposal came from people in the Task Group, reviewers might view that our work was submitted unfinished.
A third option might be to leave the proposal as is without additional terms, get it through ratification, and sometime afterwards propose new terms. This follows the normal evolution process of Darwin Core, so there would not be anything odd about it. It would also guarantee that there is demand for such terms, as that is a prerequisite for accepting new term proposals.
It isn't for the Darwin Core Maintenance Group to decide the strategy the Task Group should take, but rather to advise and facilitate in the search for a successful proposal
I hope this feels like we are getting close.
Cheers,
John and Steve on behalf of the Darwin Core Maintenance Group