Procedures For Technical Work
Roles of DAVIC bodies for technical work
| The General Assembly (GA) | approves the workplan |
| approves the specifications | |
| The Board of Directors (BD) | is elected by the GA |
| appoints the Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (AC) | |
| approves the workplan for consideration by the GA | |
| appoints the Management Committee (MC) | |
| instructs the MC to produce a Call for Proposals (CFP) | |
| publishes the specifications approved by the GA | |
| The Strategic Planning (SP) | is appointed by the BD |
| produces and updates the draft workplan | |
| The Management Committee (MC) | is appointed by the BD |
| produces and issues Call for Proposals (CFP) | |
| establishes and disbands Technical Committees (TC) | |
| appoints TC Chairs and Vice Chairs | |
| coordinates the development of specifications | |
| is responsible of the timely delivery of specifications | |
| The Technical Committees (TC) | are appointed by the MC |
| produce specifications |
Decision Process for Technical Matters
In all matters of a technical nature, it is desirable and therefore strongly recommended that all decisions be reached by consensus. However, in order to reach a conclusion in a timely way, and as detailed in subsequent sections, it may occasionally be necessary to solve conflicts by voting. In such cases, the general procedure will be to structure a resolution so that the decision is reduced to a simple "yes" or "no" vote. Each principle member present at the voting place or represented by proxy (as defined in the statutes) will have one vote. The resolution will be approved if the number of "yes" votes excedes the number of "no" votes by the the proportion specified in the sections following. Members abstaining or not voting are not considered in the count. Voting should take place when, in the judgement of the chair, there is sufficient representation of positions. There is no concept of quorum involved in this voting
Technical Committees
Technical Committees are established by the MC and provided with a written Charter stating the purpose and objective of the Technical Committee. The principal goal of a Technical Committee is the production of one or more component parts of a particular version of DAVIC specifications.
The Technical Committee shall have a Chairman, a Vice-Chairman and Editor(s) where the Chairman and Vice-Chairman are appointed by the Management Committee and endorsed by the Technical Committee participants.
Participation in the working sessions of the Technical Committee will be according to the following guidelines.
It is the Chairman's responsibility to see that an orderly meeting occurs including the censure or ejection of disruptive participants.
All meetings will be attended in person only and there will be no attendance through audio or video teleconferencing. The Chairman can make exceptions if special circumstances warrant.
Identification of New Work Items
The Strategic Planning (SP) Advisory Committee (SPAC) is mandated to produce proposals for DAVIC work-plans and to monitor the actual specification creation. The work-plans indicate which new systems, tools and reference points need to be added to the DAVIC specifications and at what time they are needed.
A new SPAC is established at beginning of each major new DAVIC work cycle (ie-DAVIC 1.6, 1.7…). As far as is possible, the SPAC should include representatives from a broad range of industries and regions. A member of the DAVIC Board will chair SPAC.
DAVIC work items are decided upon using the following steps: -
The MC is in charge of deploying the resulting work-plan and to ensure co-ordinated execution of the work items within the time frame specified by the work-plan
The Management Committee maintains an "Inventory of Standards and Specifications of potential DAVIC interest" using information coming from standards bodies, industry consortia and individual members which may also be used as inputs to New Work Items.
Initiation of a DAVIC Work Item
At the appropriate time, the BD instructs the Management Committee (MC) to produce a Call for Proposals (CFP) addressing the specific New Work Item.. The MC also receives the plan of development of the work item and, in order to facilitate the subsequent work, is asked to produce a list of standards that the MC believes to be of possible use in the subsequent development of the identified work item. In general, the CFP will contain requests for several elementary technologies (sub-work-items). The BD publishes the CFP by sending it to the membership and all interested parties who make themselves known to the Secretariat. The CFP always contains the following statement relative to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR):
In submitting a proposal, the proposing entity must submit a formal document acknowledging that in case part or all of its proposed technologies are included in DAVIC specifications and the included part contains patented items which are necessary for the implementation of DAVIC specifications and the proposing entity owns the relevant IPR, the proposing entity will accept the IEC/ISO/ITU practice for patented items in international standards. This amounts to either giving free use of the patented items, or giving license on fair and reasonable terms and on a non-discriminatory basis.
The following procedural requirements are also placed on all who reply to the call:
a. The proposer shall include an IPR statement modelled after the statement contained in the CFP;
b. The proposer shall request and obtain a registration number from the DAVIC Secretariat;
c. The proposer shall submit his document in the form and quantity prescribed by the CFP by the deadline indicated by the Call to the DAVIC Secretariat.
DAVIC reserves the right to retain for consideration only those submissions which are in response to an item requested by the Call, within the given deadline and with the appropriate IPR statement. Documents addressing items not in the Call, without an IPR statement or beyond the deadline will be listed by the Management Committee in the "Inventory of Standards and Specifications" only for possible future use.
The accepted submissions will be screened by the TCs for the purpose of identifying whether, for any of the items requested in the CFP, there is sufficient technology either through submissions or from available standards or widely known specifications. If, for any item, it is judged that insufficient technology is available, the MC, in consultation with the BD, may decide to issue another call for these items or to develop the necessary technology internally or to drop the item from consideration. The MC shall then produce a report to the BD on the outcome of all CFPs.
On the creation of a New Work Item or at the completion of an existing Work Item the MC may decide to establish new TCs or to disband some of the existing TCs.
Technical work
Submissions retained for consideration and standards identified to be relevant for the work item shall be assigned to the appropriate TCs on a sub-work-item basis. TCs will be given a precise duration of time to produce the version of DAVIC specifications corresponding to the current work item.
A TC shall produce progressive revisions of the DAVIC specification part(s) assigned to it. In the development of specifications a TC shall be driven by two basic principles:
1. delivering specifications of the highest possible quality given the limitation of time and technology within the given deadline;
2. only one tool shall be specified for any functionality to avoid unnecessary duplication of components that are difficult to change in the target applications.
As a principle, specifications shall draw elements from existing standards, in the order: international, regional, national and widely used specifications. However, in making their decisions, the TCs should also balance other criteria such as technical merit, cost and wide usage.
In general the work of a TC should proceed through the following steps:
1. Exploring the different technical issues for the purpose of providing a common ground for good technical decisions;
2. Attempting to reach consensus on a series of decisions;
3. When reasonable attempts to achieve consensus have failed the TC Chair may decide to use TC membership voting in order to obtain a conclusion on a given issue. If a TC membership vote is required, the Chair shall post sufficiently in advance a notice of the planned vote with indication of the item to be voted. The decision of a TC shall be made using the voting procedure described in "Decision Process for Technical Matters" above. The amount of time to be used in the effort to achieve consensus is directly related to the capability of the TC to produce the requested specifications by the assigned deadline;
4. The MC may require a TC to reconsider a decision if there are inconsistencies between the outputs of different TCs or when the decision seriously jeopardises the quality of DAVIC specifications;
5. At every meeting of DAVIC a TC shall produce a new revision of the specifications assigned to it that is approved by the GA. The editors will upload the new revision to the DAVIC server in the shortest time practical after the meeting of the GA that approved the revision.
6. In the case the Management Committee (MC) identifies the need to use a standard that is the competence of an international standards body, for which a decision is known to be planned to be made at a time that, in the judgement of the MC, prevents DAVIC from meeting its objectives, the BD will request the MC to identify these conflicts and will provide the Board with technical arguments for taking a decision indicating the latest possible deadline that does not jeopardise the delivery of specifications by the agreed time. The BD will make a good faith effort to solicit the action of the relevant standards body prior to making their decision and, in case this effort is not successful, the MC will ask the appropriate TC to make an internal decision;
7. When specifications will have achieved a sufficient degree of maturity the MC will request the concerned TCs to produce specifications in an integrated form using the contributions from all concerned TCs. During this process the specifications shall remain for membership use only;
8. In general, specifications shall be frozen (i.e. all multiple choices for a DAVIC tool shall have been reduced to just one) sufficiently in advance to the planned publication date, typically for two DAVIC meetings before approval for publication. Frozen specifications shall be approved by the General Assembly by 2/3 of the Principal Members voting. When this is achieved the document shall be made public, i.e. known also outside the DAVIC membership, and comments shall be solicited from anybody;
9. At every meeting up and including the first freezing of specifications a Formal Communication Point of a Member represented at the meeting where a certain revision has been approved has the right to send a communication to the Secretariat that they now want to cast a negative vote on a particular issue. This communication shall
If an issue receives negative votes for more than 1/3 of the members represented at the meeting where the new revision was approved, the issue will be removed from the revision. The Secretariat will give due communication of the fact to the membership;
10. When specifications are frozen interoperability tests will be carried out for the purpose of verifying and validating as much as possible the frozen specifications and determining whether changes or improvements are required;
11. Comments to the frozen specifications or results from interoperability tests suggesting reconsideration of specific items may come from a member, a non-member or a DAVIC TC. These shall be made known to the membership by uploading the comments on the DAVIC server at the latest one week in advance of the meeting called to produce the second frozen revision of the specifications. At the beginning of the meeting a full list of comments received will be produced by the MC and distributed to the membership. Comments will be accepted only because of demonstrated inadequacies of the frozen specifications or inconsistencies with other parts of the same or previously published specifications. When the membership will be asked to approve the next revision of the frozen specifications a list of how the issues that have received comments have been dealt with shall be made known to the members present so that an informed vote can be taken;
12. The MC shall send any revision of the specifications under development to the BD for comment from the time they are frozen;
13. In the overall process the MC will act as the coordinator, particularly when a given version of the DAVIC specifications involves a plurality of TCs;
14. Any member may request the activation of a procedure to correct the specification if, in the opinion of the member, the published text does not correspond to the agreed text at the GA that approved the specification. After review and consolidation by the MC requests will be brought to the General Assembly;
15. Eventually, after TC approval, the GA will be asked to approve the particular final version of the DAVIC specifications. They will be approved if 2/3 of the members voting will vote in favour. Abstentions and members absent will not be counted.
16. After approval, the editors will review the specifications and make any appropriate editorial changes. Each part of the edited version will be reviewed again by the appropriate TC chairman. Each TC chairman will certify that the part of the specification which is under the responsibility of his TC is publishable. Publishable means that technical content is aligned with decisions made by the TCs and the GA and that any other changes are purely editorial. The general editor will collate all the parts to create a complete document. The DAVIC specifications will be published after the final BD approval.
17. Requests of corrigenda may be submitted by anybody, member or non-member, or by a DAVIC TC. A corrigenda is defined as changes in the detail of a previously specified item in final published specification. Corrigenda point out and correct discovered errors which could cause a misunderstanding of the specification or a malfunction. Typical types of corrigenda correct editorial, typographical or reference errors,or incorrect numerical details. Corrigenda cannot be used to add or change technology. When a corrigendum is proposed, the TC chairman will judge its validity and obtain agreement of the MC chairman in order to post it as proposed corrigenda not yet approved by DAVIC immediately on the public side of the FTP site. Appropriate notification and request for comments will be sent to the formal communication points of each member organisation. These corrigenda submitted by the TCs will be approved by a 2/3 majority vote of members voting or represented by proxies, as specified in the Statutes provided that, at least, a one month period for review and comments has elapsed between the initial posting and the GA. Abstentions and members absent will not be counted.
18. As a general principle, modification of published DAVIC specifications should be avoided,
especially if the modification would cause significant incompatibilities with existing equipment operating in accordance with the specification. Nevertheless, modifications may be justified in exceptional circumstances, such as:
In such circumstances, if there is unanimous agreement within the TC designated by MC, the TC may recommend to the MC that a particular technology should be removed from the published specification. At the request of the MC, the TC should produce a Call for Replacement (CFR) which proposes removal of a particular technology from a DAVIC specification and, if appropriate, identifies candidate technologies with IPR statement for replacement. The CFR should also solicit information about practical experience with current implementations of the technology, plans for its impending use, details of any impact that would result from withdrawal of the technology and proposals for replacement technologies. The CFR must be approved by the General Assembly by 3/4 of Members voting. When this is achieved, the CFR shall be published by the BD by sending it to the membership and other interested parties.
Responses to the CFR should be handled in accordance with the procedures for handling responses to CFPs. However, in the event of any response indicating that it can be demonstrated that the technology has already been used satisfactorily in a DAVIC-compliant system and wishes to object to the change, no further action should be taken to replace the technology without the specific approval of the BD.
Description of the DAVIC process
DAVIC holds regular meetings which typically last five working days. DAVIC weeks usually involve all TCs and the MC. All work is done by Member representatives physically present at the meeting. The work of a DAVIC week is coordinated by the General Assembly meeting in plenary sessions. Plenaries are usually held three times, at the beginning of the first day, on the third day, and at the end of the fifth day. MC meetings are held every day at different times of the day, however, at the end of every working day TC Chairs and Vice Chairs are usually asked to join the MC. In advance of the first plenary the MC meets with the TC Chairs and Vice Chairs to coordinate and organise the work of the week and to discuss any issues currently needing resolution.
The main purpose of a DAVIC week is to produce either the initial version or the next revision of the DAVIC specifications currently under development. The main purpose of the opening plenary is to agree on the workplan of the week.
Using the procedure described previously under the section "Technical work" the TCs work towards the goal of producing either the initial version or next revision of the part(s) of the specifications they are responsible for. Using their technical expertise the TCs attempt to reach a consensus on a sequence of issues and on rare occasions they may need to resort to TC membership voting. Because of the complexity of some of the issues a TC may decide to establish subgroups whose validity spans at most the week. Subgroups do not have special decision power and any conclusion reached by the subgroups needs to be endorsed by the parent TC.
Even though on certain issues there are joint TC meetings, the component parts of the specifications are usually so interrelated that daily harmonisation and coordination meetings are called at the initiative of the MC and are attended by TC Chairs and Vice Chairs as required. This process is usually repeated every day of the meeting.
A further synchronisation and consensus building point involving all delegates occurs at the mid-week plenary where short reports are made by the different TC Chairs on the progress of work of their TCs.
In the general case, because of the many synchronisation meetings, the recommendations proposed by the different TCs at the final plenary meeting are accepted with modifications that are agreed upon by consensus. On certain rare occasions during the final plenary, an issue already resolved by one or more TCs during that week may be the subject of reconsideration if two or more members request a membership vote. At such time as the Chairman of the General Assembly deems that the issue has been sufficiently debated, a vote can be taken of all Principal Members present. A motion to overturn the decision of a TC shall only be carried if more than 2/3 of the Principal Members voting approve. Abstentions and members absent will not be counted.
The results of a DAVIC meeting are summarised in a set of approved resolutions, including the recommendations produced by the TCs. These usually make reference to other documents. Reference to a document in a resolution implies approval of the applicable parts of that document unless explicit limitations are added in that resolution.
Submission of technical documents
a. Documents from standards bodies, at least at the level of public enquiry, may be entered at any time into DAVIC. The document will not be considered in the DAVIC specification development if
i) the document is entered after the freezing of specifications that could have used the technology contained in the entered document;
ii) the IPR policy of that standards body is not aligned with that of IEC/ISO/ITU, unless the owner of the relevant IPR provides the requested IPR statement.
b. Documents from members are entered into the appropriate DAVIC TC if they are in response to:
i) a Call for Proposals. In this case documents are accepted only if they are in response to an item requested by the Call and within the given deadline. Documents addressing items not in the Call, without an IPR statement or beyond the deadline will be listed by the Management Committee in the Inventory of "Standards and Specifications" for possible future use;
ii) a request for clarification or minor extension precisely identified in the resolutions of a DAVIC TC. Documents addressing items not requested by a TC will be listed by the Management Committee in the Inventory of "Standards and Specifications" for possible future use;
iii) identification of a problem area.
c. Documents from non members are entered into the appropriate DAVIC TC if they are in response to b.i) above with the same conditions as for members.
Liaison and advocacy
DAVIC attaches particular importance to the correct relationship with other bodies, in particular formal standards bodies. The definition of formal standards bodies is:
a. International Standards Bodies (IEC/ISO/ITU);
b. Regional Standards Bodies;
c. National Standards Bodies as recognised by IEC/ISO;
d. Other bodies with standard setting authority.
In dealing with other bodies the following rules apply:
a. Formal communication with external bodies is the responsibility of the Board of Directors;
b. Formal communication with the external body or entities thereof may be delegated to the Management Committee by the Board of Directors upon establishment of a formal liaison relationship with that body;
c. Two types of liaison can be established by the Board of Directors:
1. Accredited DAVIC Member Representatives may attend designated groups of the external body in question, without membership fees or voting rights and vice versa;
2. Accredited representatives of DAVIC Members who are also members of the external body may bring designated DAVIC documents to that body and vice versa.
d. Where a formal relation with an external body has not yet been established, DAVIC documents of a purely technical nature may be made known to that body or entities thereof by a common member who will be charged by the relevant DAVIC TC Chair, with the approval of the MC, to submit the DAVIC document as an annex to a document sourced "the common member on behalf of DAVIC";
e. The Management Committee also establishes a master list of external bodies whose scope and activities are directly relevant to DAVIC interests and specifications. For each of these bodies DAVIC appoints advocates and identifies specific topics of interest to DAVIC;
f. Advocates participate in both DAVIC and the external standards organisation;
g. Advocates are nominated by the TCs and approved by the MC. Candidates for formal liaisons are nominated by the TCs and MC and approved by the BD;
h. Advocates and liaisons are responsible for conveying DAVIC documents to external bodies and for keeping DAVIC TCs informed on developments related to existing and any new topics of interest;
i. The Board of Directors maintains the list of DAVIC Advocates and Liaisons and is responsible for ensuring that an update is produced at each DAVIC meeting;
j. The Management Committee, based on the input of the advocates and liaisons and the results from various formal processes such as the CFPs. maintains a list of the technologies and standards relevant to DAVIC Specifications.
Ad-hoc groups
The General assembly or TCs may decide to establish ad-hoc groups. These are governed by the following operating rules:
a. AHGs (Ad-hoc Groups) are established for the sole purpose of continuing work between consecutive DAVIC weeks. They are established by the General Assembly or TCs and report to them;
b. The task of an AHG may only cover preparation of recommendations to be submitted to the General assembly or TCs. Any other document produced has the status of "input document" to the following regular DAVIC meeting;
c. The duration of an AHG is normally limited to the period between 2 successive DAVIC weeks. They cease to exist at the start of a DAVIC week.
d. AHGs shall be established with mandate, membership, chairman, duration and meeting schedule at a DAVIC week;
e. A numbered DAVIC document will describe the items listed above in d;
f. Participation to AHGs shall not be restricted to the delegates present at the meeting during which the AHG is established;
g. AHGs shall issue a report upon completion of their task. The report shall be delivered to the Chairman of the entity which has created this group at the start of the DAVIC week marking the end of the AHG.
h. The report shall be a numbered DAVIC document;
i. Members of an AHG may be given shorter notice of meetings (including agenda) by the AHG chairman in writing. Such notice shall be given by the chairman not less than two weeks in advance of the proposed meeting. Should any member of the AHG object in writing, meetings may only be held according to formally established meeting schedule for that AHG. The Chairman of the entity which created the ad-hoc group shall be consulted by the Chairman of the ad-hoc group on any intention to convene an unplanned meeting.
j. The Chairman of the entity which create the group and the chairman of the ad-hoc group must receive copy of all ad-hoc group correspondence exchanged between members of the AHG.
k. The use of electronic mail for a successful execution of the mandate is encouraged.
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