Subject: WFC vote deferred once more

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 09:04:07 EDT

Dear WFC (and IAU WG-chairman Preben Grosbol),

There have been a series of private Email exchanges on the details of
the string-array proposal (appendix C) during the past 36 hours. It is
clear that we do not yet have a consensus, and that more discussion
will be needed to obtain an agreement which everyone can support
whole-heartedly. Therefore, we will wait. I exhort the people who are
involved to pursue this matter diligently -- the community as a whole
needs to have a final decision on BINTABLE.

The people who are involved, who are experienced FITS negotiators,
will need to decide whether the discussion should be public or
private. The advantage of private discussion -- as always -- is speed,
while the advantage of public discussion is that the FITS community at
large would be able to contribute its opinions and would feel that it
is a part of the process.

If the decision is for public discussion, the negotiators will need to
decide whether to use the wfc exploder or sci.astro.fits/fitsbits. I
can think of arguments for both.

     -*-

A major lesson of FITS history is that bi-lateral negotiations work.
For ten years the astronomy community had huge success with this
formula. Another lesson of the history is that tri-lateral
negotiations are *much* harder than bi-lateral. Now, in the era of
three regional FITS committees, one of which has 20 voting members, we
have moved well beyond even tri-lateral negotiations. We are engaged
in a fundamentally *political* process, unfamiliar ground for physical
scientists and computing specialists. Political processes are
inherently inefficient. We must always be patient, and as civil as we
can be, as we work out our differences of opinion and forge a
consensus so that we can accomplish something substantive. Designs
done in a political context are *compromises*. This is neither good
nor bad, it is just the way things are, the way they have to be.

Best regards,
Don

Donald C. Wells             Associate Scientist        [email-masked]
National Radio Astronomy Observatory                   +1-804-296-0277
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