[fitsbits] Bintable proposals: regional voting results

[William Pence]

This message is to announce the voting results by the 4 regional FITS
committees on proposals to officially endorse 2 conventions related to FITS
binary tables:

   1.  a convention for storing variable-length arrays in columns by
       using the 'P' array descriptor data format

   2.  a convention for specifying the dimensionality of arrays using
       the TDIMn keyword.

Both these conventions have been described in unofficial appendices to the
FITS Standard document since the early 1990s and have been widely used by
various groups within the FITS community since then.  The full text of the 2
proposals may be viewed at http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/bintable_proposals.html.

The voting results on the 2 proposals for each regional committee are
summarized in the following tables.  The first 3 columns of numbers give the
number of 'Yes', 'No', and 'Abstain' votes that were cast.  The 4th column
lists the number of members that did not vote at all, and the last column
states whether the proposal passed under the formal rules recently adopted
by the IAU FITS Working Group.


                  Proposal 1: Variable Length Arrays

  Committee            Yes No Abstain Non-vote  Passed
-------------------   --- -- ------- --------  ----
Japan                   9   0    1       1      Yes
Australia/New Zealand   6   0    1       0      Yes
Europe                  6   0    2       4       No
North America          13   0    0       5      Yes
TOTAL                  34   0    4      10


                   Proposal 2. The TDIMn keyword convention

  Committee            Yes No Abstain Non-vote  Passed
-------------------   --- -- ------- --------  ----
Japan                   9   0    1       1      Yes
Australia/New Zealand   6   0    1       0      Yes
Europe                  8   0    0       4      Yes
North America          13   0    0       5      Yes
TOTAL                  36   0    2      10


As can be seen in the last column of the tables, all the committees approved
the second proposal, but the first proposal was only formally approved by 3
of the committees.  Since this is the first time that a regional committee
has not passed a FITS proposal, some further discussion of this is presented
below.

The technical reason that the proposal did not pass is because more then 1/3 
of the committee members did not vote or voted to 'abstain'.  The formal 
voting rules require that at least 2/3 of the members (8 out of 12 in the 
case of the European committee) must cast a proactive 'Yes' or 'No' vote. In 
addition,  at least 2/3 of those votes must be 'yes' (see
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/iaufwg/iaufwg_rules.html).  Even though the
majority of members who did cast a vote were in favor of the proposal (with
6 'Yes' and 2 'Abstain' votes) the fact that 4 members did not respond to
the call for votes was the main reason for the defeat of the proposal.  This
situation was partially caused by the fact that the committee chairman no
longer had a valid email address for 2 of those non-voting members and thus
was unable to contact them.  Regardless, they are still formally members of
the committee and their lack of vote still counts against the proposal.

It should be stressed that this lack of formal endorsement by one of the
regional committees does not prevent the proposal from being considered and
voted on by the IAU FITS Working Group in the near future.  The regional
committees serve as advisers to the IAU FITS Working group, which has the
final authority over FITS-related matters (as delegated by Commission 5 of
Division 12 of the IAU).

In order to avoid a repeat of this situation in future votes, the regional
FITS committee chairmen have been asked to review the membership of their
committees to try to ensure that all the members are committed to actively
participating in the discussions and votes on FITS issues.  The IAU-FWG will
also consider revising the formal voting rules to perhaps lessen the impact
of non-voting members on the outcome.

In the final analysis, I believe it is important to focus on the results 
from the members who took the effort to study the proposals and actually 
cast a vote and not on the 10 members who did not participate in the 
process.  The final combined tally of all the regional committee members who 
actually voted was:

    Proposal 1:  34 Yes, 0 No, 4 Abstain
    Proposal 2:  36 Yes, 0 No, 2 Abstain


William Pence
Chairman, IAU FITS Working Group
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          William.D.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662         HEASARC         +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                         +1-301-286-1684 (fax)