Thread Subject: Re: Requests from General forfuture considerations

From: Peter Korn
Date: Mon, Oct 30 2006 3:15 PM

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Hi Tom, Jared,

I believe I was one of the folks speaking to this idea, so I'd like to
clarify my thoughts.

I'm not suggesting that we prevent interested members of the public from
joining the discussions. Rather, I'm suggesting that we add a human
layer in between the website wiki & mailing list sign-up pages, to
filter out robots and anyone who simply wants to maliciously alter our
website. In the past week I've heard of multiple instances of this,
which is why I suggest it. It would mean that a human being (or
collection of them) would need to read through every e-mail request to
join the subcommittee mailing lists or to post to the wiki, and
explicitly grand permission. Such a person could potentially prevent a
bona fide potential contributer from participating if he/she wanted, but
I think that is very unlikely (especially if multiple folks see each
request and they are logged).

So if we were to go with something like this, I think the end result
would be a bit more work for whoever takes on this tasks (potentially SC
co-chairs, potentially Access Board staff), and result in a short delay
for new folks wanting to participate, but it would prevent the kind of
problems that I was hearing about in multiple SCs last week.

As far as FACA, my understanding (please some correct me if I'm wrong)
is that it requires that the main committee meetings be public and that
there be a public comment period in each one. I think it is our own
charter (which was adopted at the first TEITAC meeting) which stated
that all SC work would be viewable by the public (in addition to the
U.S. government), and that membership in SCs would be open to the
public. I don't think we adopted anything that stated that joining an
SC had to be a computer automated task with no human
processing/verification involved.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> Limiting future membership in subcommittee[s] would also seem to be in
> conflict Federal Advisory Committee Act.
>
> Tom Brett
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = on behalf of Jared Smith
> *Sent:* Mon 10/30/2006 3:15 PM
> *To:* TEITAC Communications Task Force
> *Cc:* TEITAC General Interface Accessibility Subcommittee
> *Subject:* Re: [teitac-general] [teitac-tools] Requests from General
> forfuture considerations
>
> On 10/30/06, *Bailey Bruce* < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
> <mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >> wrote:
>
> The General subcommittee asks that future membership in
> subcommittee be
> an agenda item for discussion at the November 8th and 9th sessions.
>
> The General subcommittee asks the Tools Task Force to investigate
> separating out the ability to subscribe from the ability to post to a
> list.
>
>
> This is probably a discussion for the main committee meeting, but what
> is the reason for limiting subcommittee membership and participation?
> Any move in this direction seems to go against the protocols that were
> adopted. On the conference call, it was noted that this is to
> alleviate the spam 'problem', when with the exception of a couple of
> links added to a wiki page, there has been no spam at all. I just
> wouldn't want there to be an impression that spam is a big problem and
> that the only way to solve it is to lock everything down when there is
> no existing spam problem to begin with. Much has been done to ensure
> that spam is minimized and if it does occur, it is quickly removed. If
> the motivations for limiting public activity is something else
> (subcommittees are too large, not balanced, etc.), then let's
> certainly proceed with that discussion.
>
> Jared
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

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