Proposed Message regarding X3J13 Membership

[RPG]

Below is a proposed message announcing the committee memberships,
progress, and what to do next. Please comment and/or amend this.
Once we all agree, we should mail it out.

Subject: Members of the Common Lisp Committee

At the December Common Lisp meeting Bob Mathis, Scott Fahlman, Guy Steele,
Dan Weinreb, Dave Moon, and Dick Gabriel were charged with the duty of
nominating a technical committee and a steering committee for the purpose
of defining an ISO Lisp.  This message is to report on the membership of
those committees, to describe the actions we have taken towards making
those committees official, and to outline the next steps we need to take.

First, we have decided not to create the committee under DARPA
sponsorship, but to operate within the ANSI framework, setting up a
committee for Common Lisp under X3 tentatively known as X3J13.  X3J13 will
have international members, but we have not asked anyone outside the US to
join as yet, though we intend to invite some number.

There are two committess of importance, the steering committee and the
technical committee.  The steering committee is charged with guiding the
results of the technical committee through the standarization process,
particularly at the ISO level. The technical committee decides the the
language specification and develops a document specifying Common Lisp.

The American members of the steering committee are:

Bob Mathis, Private Consultant 
Steve Squires, DARPA 
Ron Ohlander, USC-ISI
John McCarthy, Stanford University 
Guy Steele Jr, Thinking Machines 
Dick Gabriel, Lucid

The American members of the technical committee were chosen according to
several criteria:

(1) The member must have a deep knowledge of Lisp and its implementation,
with experience in at least one serious Lisp implementation.

(2) The member must be a well-recognized, prominent individual.  He or she
must be someone whose reputation is recognized internationally.

(3) The member must represent an important segment of the current Lisp
community.

We recognize, though, that many important people have been left off of the
committee. In particular, not all implementation efforts are represented.
In order to recognize the contribution to Common Lisp that these efforts
have made by supporting Common Lisp and to ensure that the experience of
these efforts is not lost, we will ask each implementation group to
designate an individual to whom all technical decisions must be presented
before decisions are made.

Although these technical liasons will not officially vote on the technical
committee, the technical committee will consider the votes of these
individuals carefully when making decisions. One of the first tasks of the
technical committee will be to set up a set of procedures for making
decisions and accepting comments and proposals from the Common Lisp
community. Until then we can only state that a close working relationship
with the Common Lisp community and with the implementation groups in
particular is one of our main goals.

The American members of the technical committee are:

Alan Bawden, MIT
Dan Bobrow, Xerox
Scott Fahlman, CMU (Chairman of the Technical Committee)
Dick Gabriel, Lucid
Dave Moon, Symbolics
Jonathon Rees, MIT
Guy Steele, Thinking Machines

At this point a document has been submitted to the Standards Planning and
Requirements Committee of X3, known as SPARC, proposing the formation of
the X3J13 committee.  SPARC is the committee which must approve the
formation of any new technical committees. The document outlines the need
for such a committee, the scope of the standard, the potential members of
the committee, and the plan and schedule for accomplishing the standard.

I hope that the standarization work informally started in the Lisp community
will continue to fruition at the international level.

				Dick Gabriel
				Scott Fahlman
				Dave Moon
				Dan Weinreb
				Guy Steele
				Bob Mathis