[iaufwg] Final FITS review comments

[Arnold Rots]

Bill,

May I suggest an amendment to the voting procedure you just outlined?
In keeping with time-honored parliamentary tradition, one would vote
in succession on all three proposals, the farthest-reaching one first.
We cannot do that because of the clause on no-votes, but it seems to
me that the straw vote on no-votes that you just outlined on the three
proposals would achieve more or less the same result.

The order of the three proposals would be:

Motion 1: put adoption off by, say, 6 months in order to add an audit
trail appendix to the document

Motion 3: vote on adoption immediately, but put a reference in to an
audit trail that will be constructed and maintained online

Motion 2: vote on adoption immediately, without any audit trail
appendix


I would suggest that you ask who would likely cast a no-vote on any of
these proposals and move the first one, in the order 1-3-2, that has
no no-votes on to the proper voting process.

Cheers,

  - Arnold


William Pence wrote:
> Dear IAU-FWG members,
> 
> A number of good ideas have been floated here on how to address the 
> issue of documenting past changes to the definition of FITS;  Mark's 
> email yesterday is a useful step forward.  However it seems clear to me 
> that reaching a final agreement will still require a significant amount 
> of time.  Each of us have somewhat different views, and it will take 
> time to reach a consensus, especially when the discussions have to be 
> done via email across scattered timezones.  We will also surely want to 
> move this discussion to the wider FITS community on the FITSBITS email 
> list to take advantage of the experience of the many FITS software 
> developers on that list who have had real world experience dealing with 
> old FITS files.
> 
> I agree with the other recent postings here that we should not hold up 
> the final approval of the draft FITS Standard over this one issue which 
> is largely peripheral to all the other important enhancements in this 
> new version.  Consequently, I plan to press ahead with the formal vote 
> on the 3.0 draft FITS Standard as it now stands (with the 4 corrections 
> noted previously).  This vote will be taken with the clear understanding 
> that further work on documenting past changes to FITS will be done. 
> Even if no other volunteers step forward, I can promise to at least 
> gather what existing material is available and make it accessible in 
> some coherent fashion on the FITS Support Office Web site.  I think it 
> would be unwise to try to make any last minute changes to the current 
> document on a piecemeal basis without involving the wider FITS 
> community.  Any hasty changes could have unanticipated consequences and 
> could turn out to be not entirely compatible with whatever we finally 
> decide to do in the end.
> 
> I propose to call for a vote on the draft Standard in 2 weeks time, on 
> April 30th.  According to our voting rules, each of the IAU-FWG members 
> will then have 3 weeks to send in a vote of 'Yes', 'No', or 'Abstain' on 
> whether to accept this latest draft as the new official FITS Standard.
> 
> Our voting rules require that the chairman must first ask if any of you 
> are likely to vote 'No' on this question.  As you know, any 'No' votes 
> would force a temporary halt to the voting process, to allow time to try 
> to reach some acceptable compromise.  So, if you think you would cast a 
> 'No' vote, you should send a private email to me detailing your 
> objections, so that we can try to deal with the issue prior to the 
> official vote.
> 
> Bill
> -- 
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Dr. William Pence                       William.Pence at nasa.gov
> NASA/GSFC Code 662       HEASARC        +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
> Greenbelt MD 20771                      +1-301-286-1684 (fax)
> 
> 
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Arnold H. Rots                                Chandra X-ray Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots at head.cfa.harvard.edu
USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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