Meeting 25 Minutes

Teleconference, October 10th, 2006
A quorum of 7 out of 12 voting members present. Attendance indicated on the roster web page.

1. Call to order

Meeting was called to order at 09:02 PST/16:02 GMT.

2. Approval of minutes from meeting 23

First order of business is approval of the minutes from meeting 23, just as a reminder we did not have official minutes from meeting 24, that was an informal meeting.

Darren Galpin moves to approve the minutes.
Andy Piziali seconds.
No objections/abstainers. The motion to approve the minutes was carried.

3. Status Update

3.1. Status of the current standards publication that’s IEEE 1647-2006. That standard was published - hopefully everyone on the call received a confirmation e-mail and a complimentary copy of the pdf of the standard. Anyone who has not received it, please notify the chair. Anyway the standard is there, it looks pretty good, it is actually on the IEEE website for purchase and you’ll be happy to hear that the list price is $105 per copy. I’ve added a link to the product from our download page for interested parties and I expect this to hit the best seller list any day now.

2. Donations for the new revision of the PAR, I believe this donation process has been completed, a letter was sent out transferring the copyright from Cadence to the IEEE and that was filed with the IEEE. So now we are in the possession of five documents that we requested: Name spaces, Encapsulation chapter from the language manual, the Ports chapter from the language manual, Messages and Sequences from the eRM guide. These documents are now posted on our website on the download section and they’re intended for WG members and in the next section we’ll discuss what we’re going to do with them.

4. Work Plan

Yaron : Last week Joe and myself went through the documents and concluded that some of them namely ports, namespaces and encapsulation are simple enough that it would make sense for Joe to go ahead and edit them, bring them into the style of IEEE form before we are starting a review process. The rest of the document, messages and sequences are actually more complex they contain a combination of both methodology and language semantics and lots of examples. They really require some initial bearing down before it would make sense for Joe to go ahead and edit those. Of those two messages is the smaller one and sequences is the more robust one. The plan moving forward is for Joe to start working on the files that we have identified as the simpler ones and have some WG members have a look at the eRM ones and we’re hoping that mid January ’07 we will have at least three chapters but hopefully four chapters ready for a WG members review, at which time hopefully Joe will be able to move forward with the remaining eRM portion, hopefully just sequences because the messages one is simple enough to be done within the timeframe till mid January. If all goes well we should be in line for an early June for a review of the WG and which, judging by the last process timeline we would assume that we may be able to make the end of year timeline for the next revision of the standard – end of ’07.

Obviously to carry this workplan out we’ll have to have work done – I’m looking for some willing peers to be the review process for these documents, in particular the eRM documents: the sequences and messages documents. The main article of work there is to outline the language construct and retain the material that relates to the language construct and maybe create an annex for the methodology part that will become just an informative annex in the standard. So I will be bugging people but let me know if you’re interested in taking part in this effort.

Joe: Only a small portions of the Ports document is actually new.

Yaron: thanks for the comment. Ports contain much of the material that we already incorporated in the current standard, the only thing that is outstanding is method ports which is just a small portion of that chapter and that is really where our work is focused currently. That will be incorporated into the port clause in the new revision.

5. Other Business

Joe: Have there been any volunteers for messages or sequences?

Yaron : We just sent out the message, I expect people will phone me if they’re interested and I’ll be doing my own recruiting in the hope of finding the right people again the biggest chunk here is the sequences, the messages are less problematic.

Joe: Are you anticipating the ballot will be next autumn/next winter?

Yaron: I think the best case scenario is for the working group to clear this in the June timeframe and then we will get the ballot organized, it will probably take until September for that so we may be able to make this for the 4th quarter RevCom meeting. So essentially by the end of the year, as we know things may go wrong in many different ways, this is just a draft plan for now.

Joe : For the WG you have a broader timeline similar to the last passage through IEEE, if we actually ballot in the summer review comments and everything else in the autumn, hit the IEEE RevCom by December of 2007 that means we’ll see an actual published standard again sometime in the autumn of 2008.

Yaron : Yes – this is unfortunate but there’s nothing much we can do to accelerate that production part of the IEEE. Actually given the fact that this is a revision maybe we could. We’ll see.

6. Patent policy

The chair has issued a call for essential patents, in compliance with current IEEE/SA PatCom guidelines. The WG members are advised to review the call for essential patents and the patent related slide presentation posted on the web site.

7. Next meeting

We are bound by the 30 days notice requirement which means that November 13 is probably the earliest time for a meeting – that would be a Monday mid November and given the schedule with holidays in December it may as well be the last meeting for this year. So we will probably be conducting some business via e-mail because the frequency of meetings is not all that high.

Please remember to send in your e-mail to rollcall@ieee1647.org so that your attendance on this call is registered.

The next meeting is tentatively set to Monday November 13th at 09:00 AM Pacific time, 17:00 UTC. The date may change according to circumstances.

8. Adjourn

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(Updated Thu Nov 9 19:15:40 PST 2006)