Suggested additional agenda item: NCITS assumption of T12 projects

Background:

NCITS SD-2 4.3.5 states "For all other NCITS Subgroups, quorum is one-third of the voting membership with at least four members present." While the SD-2 does not specifically state a minimum membership requirement for a TC the quorum requirement makes it at least four.

Of the principal members in 1998, only three have paid their fees. Consequently we can not continue to function as a TC and hold meetings. We could perhaps continue as a three person maintenance TC as I do not find any minimum requirements for a maintenance TC.

But NCITS has indicated that they do not want to have any TC functioning with an acting Chair. The call for volunteers to Chair T12 has been issued four times with no responses to any of the calls.

As far as I know this leaves three alternatives:

1) NCITS assume the T12 projects and disband T12.

2) NCITS change T12 to a maintenance TC with an Acting Chair.

3) Withdraw the T12 projects and/or transfer some of the projects to IEEE 802.

The status of the T12 projects are that all of the domestic standards (ANS) are completed and published; most of the ISO/IEC projects are completed and published or being processed by the SC 25 Secretariat or the Central Secretariat for publication; with the two exceptions being prepared for DIS ballot being FDDI TP-PMD and FDDI LCF-PMD. IEEE 802 has normative references in some of their standards to some of the FDDI PMD standards.

In addition to completing the two remaining ISO/IEC projects (the official gate to changing to maintenance TC) T12 has a letter ballot out closing 3/19/99 to reaffirm X3.148:1988 [R1994] Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) Physical Layer (PHY); X3.229:1994 Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) Station Management (SMT); X3.239:1994 FDDI - Media Access Control-2 (MAC-2); and X3.231:1994 Fiber Distributed Data Interface, (FDDI) Physical Layer Protocol - 2 (PHY-2). I do not know if NCITS will conclude that the results of the vote are valid or not with a maximum of three votes.

Finally the NCITS billing records show more than three principal members but this is due to principal members being listed who were long ago terminated for failure to attend meetings or who never made principal membership since they had never qualified on the attendance requirement.

At the moment my calendar is open March 30 for a telecon while the next two days are currently booked.

Gene Milligan
Acting Chair T12
Acting IR T12