I'll try to respond in the coming week to specific questions and points raised on the wiki, but for now I'd just like to support Roger's position that it would be good for the TAG to have (and publish) some basic guidelines about how TDWG activities and standards should integrate.

It might help clarify this issue to note that it concerns the next level above TDWG standards; i.e., TDWG's social architecture (organizational structure and processes). The TDWG constitution and standards process are not easy to change, so we took a relatively conservative and open approach in drafting them. They are only minimally prescriptive. In contrast, documents produced by the TAG (roadmap, guidelines, etc.) can be updated more frequently -- i.e., as necessary. If a particular piece of advice turns out to be ill-considered, you can change it or delete as soon as that consensus has been reached. I think it would be very helpful to TDWG participants if TAG documents were more prescriptive about technologies and scope.

I also second Chuck's observation that techniques for producing quality software might not be completely transferable to producing quality standards. Both software and standards do contain elements of design, however, so methods or principles for assessing design quality, could have analogs in both domains.

Also note that while TDWG has recently supported software development (particularly reference implementations of standards) because it has had the resources to do so, in general TDWG will not be in the software business and cannot be seen as endorsing particular software packages (unless we get into compliance tests and certification, which seem fairly distant at this point).

Cheers,

-Stan

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From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org on behalf of Roger Hyam Sent: Sat 2007-11-24 6:32 AM To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [tdwg-tag] "Quality" in TDWG Standards

Dear Tags,

Bob Morris and Chuck Miller have made some interesting comments on this page in the wiki:

http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/QualityAssurance

I'd like to throw this open to a wider audience as I am aware that many of you are not on the notify list of the wiki pages.

The question in hand (as I see it) is this.

The TAG has a role to play maintaining the "quality" of TDWG standards. If the executive (or any other member of TDWG) asks the TAG what its opinion on a particular standard or proposed activity is how should the TAG respond.

1) Should it have a list of criteria that guide it in assessing the standard/activity?

2) Should it take a completely ad hoc approach to each request?

My opinion is that we should have at least a list of basic criteria even if some of those criteria are not appropriate to all situations. Before we embark on building such a list does anyone disagree with the notion of having a list at all?

I'll take a week of silence as assent.

Many thanks for you brain cycles on this,

Roger

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