[NeXus-committee] Base class voting schedule

[Ray Osborn]

Dear colleagues,
As you know, Peter has been enforcing a fairly aggressive schedule for
voting on the base classes, because we need to make rapid progress.  In most
cases, I think the discussion has been of a high-enough quality that the
process has worked.  However, there is a real danger of poorly
thought-through decisions that will be difficult to correct because all our
schedules are so busy and we have little time to think.  Sometimes,
important new ideas have been suggested on Friday afternoon when there is no
time for further discussion.  We need to start the debate on the Monday
morning.  I have been as guilty of this as anyone.

We need to seek expert opinion when discussing classes outside our own
expertise.  To some extent, we have been saved so far because the ISIS NeXus
working group has discussed many of these issues with a wide range of
people, but we are about to vote on some specialist topics (NXpolarizer,
NXflipper, NXmirror) that require particular care.  For example, I have just
posted a plea for expert help on the NXbeam page
<http://www.neutron.anl.gov.:8080/NeXus/23>.

I would like to ask all committee members to review the voting schedule that
Peter has put up <http://www.neutron.anl.gov.:8080/NeXus/73> now, and
identify people in your own organization who can make comments about what is
needed well in advance of the week's discussion.  Then, on the Monday when a
new debate is started, please post all their comments (or get them to
comment) so that we have a few days to thrash out the differences, rather
than a few hours.  I think people who have done instrument simulations
recently could be especially valuable.  If you have defined a component in
McStas, VITESS, IDEAS, etc. you are probably able to tell us what has to be
in the file.

The key to maintaining this schedule is advance preparation for each debate.
It will save us time in the long run.

Thanks for all your work so far.  There have been some excellent discussions
on the Swiki.
Ray

P.S. NOBUGS has been scheduled for Oct. 18-20, 2004 at PSI.  We plan to have
the next committee meeting either before or after somewhere close, and will
start a discussion of the details soon.

-- 
Dr Ray Osborn                Tel: +1 (630) 252-9011
Materials Science Division   Fax: +1 (630) 252-7777
Argonne National Laboratory  E-mail: ROsborn at anl.gov
Argonne, IL 60439-4845