reviewing

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

[KMP added for his information]

    Date: Thu, 28 Sep 89 01:54:17 -0700
    From: chapman@aitg.enet.dec.com (28-Sep-1989 0428)

    I'm beginning to package up the remaining function descriptions 
    to send for the pre-review that's to be done by a small number
    of people (just as we did for the first half of the document,
    the part you just received). 

At Symbolics we have not received anything other than "Types and Objects",
"Glossary", and some front-matter.  Were we supposed to have received
something more substantial?  Wait!  While I was composing this message
we received a large package with chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6.  By the way,
there is no chance of our being able to meet the request for comments
by October 15 in the cover letter.  I will try to get people at Symbolics
organized to read this, but it's going to take 4 to 8 weeks to read it
all and generate a coherent set of comments, even if I can get people to
give it extra high priority (it remains to be seen whether that will be
difficult, given that a beta release deadline is rapidly approaching.)
This also means there is next to no chance of Symbolics commenting on
this material before the November X3J13 meeting; certainly no chance of
commenting in time for anyone to prepare a response before the meeting.
I don't know what the reviewing schedule of other X3J13 member organizations
is like, but I imagine that for most of them it's not possible to send
back comments by October 15.

This is not a question specifically for you Kathy, but this makes me
wonder what, if anything, is on the agenda for the November meeting.

				 In case you don't remember, the first
    part of the document was broken into pieces and the following 
    people (I may have missed someone in the following list) reviewed
    a piece before the document was sent to ISO:
    Moon, Gabriel, Sandra, David Gray, Patrick Dussud, Cris Perdue,
    Pitman.
    How do you think that procedure worked? Should it be done again
    or should I just send the remainder of the document as it currently
    stands to X3J13 for its review?

It's hard for me to comment on this since I haven't yet read the
document already sent to X3J13 that arrived today, so I don't yet know
how it emerged from the individual review process, and I don't have the
slightest idea what shape the remainder of the document is in.  In
general I think it's good for an intensive review by an individual to
precede the group review, so that the group review will catch subtle
details that only get noticed when many people are reading (any
individual will miss some things), rather than having the group
reviewers distracted by simple problems that could have been found by an
initial review.

However, if doing individual reviews, including finding reviewers and
jawboning them into actually doing the review, is going to delay the
process for too long, maybe it would be better just to send it all to
X3J13 now, unless the quality is low enough that you don't feel
comfortable with that.

    Alternatively, should we just
    divide the document among ourselves and review it? 

I see no advantage at all in limiting individual reviewers to members of
the drafting committee.

    On another subject, I am in the process of taking a new assignment
    that is supposed to start mid-October. Obviously there's a fair 
    amount of work left to do on the standard and more meetings to
    attend. It is remotely possible that I will be able to allocate 
    time from my regular schedule to work on the standard, but I'm
    not counting on it. Thus turn-around time from me will be
    slower than usual. Also, I doubt I will be able to attend
    the November meeting. I don't think any of the problems I
    mention are show-stoppers, but I'd appreciate hearing your
    opinions and suggestions about what shoud be done.

That's too bad, although hardly surprising.  No one could ask you to
spend the whole rest of your life on X3J13.  I think you've put in an
impressively large amount of work and the fact that the entire project
is not yet finished is hardly your fault.

Do you think this is a reason to send the entire remaining document to
X3J13 now, essentially turning it over to them, rather than delaying and
doing more individual reviews?  To answer your request for advice on
what to do, today's snap-judgement from me is that you should mail out
the whole thing, with the unreviewed parts clearly labelled as unreviewed,
and leave it to X3J13 to decide how to proceed with it, which might be
to assign individual reviewers.

Do you think X3J13 should be searching for a new editor?  I anticipate
that there will be plenty of comments to incorporate into the document,
although since I haven't read it yet I could turn out to be (happily)
wrong.  Your message sounds like you're saying that you won't be working
on X3J13 at all any more, but at the same time you can still be counted
on to do all the work, just more slowly.  That's a contradiction and I
don't know which side of it I should believe.