While OASIS is working on making the mailing list core work better, Peter Murray-Rust and others are proposing new kinds of tools for this active community and discussing its relationship with OASIS.

Responding to OASIS President Bill Smith's announcement of an action plan, Murray-Rust also addressed suggestions from various list members to develop facilities beyond the mailing list, with or without OASIS' involvement.

"a number of exciting ideas for the operation of the XML-DEV community have arisen over the last 2 weeks. It is clear that XML-DEV can and probably will become more distributed. OASIS should not feel that it has to address all of the activities discussed - indeed my personal recommendation would be to concentrate on the maillist service and the preservation of a primary GPL archive of postings. "

Murray-Rust also noted a "let's dump OASIS" theme that had arisen during the discusion. He suggested that some reasons for this disconnect between the sponsoring organization and the more grass-roots membership of XML-DEV:

"Independently of the technical problems, there have been the following themes, some of which coincide with my own interactions:

• OASIS only cares about large vendors and not individuals or volunteers (it is too expensive for me to be a member)
• OASIS is primarily an executive and not a technical organisation
• OASIS has a very slow response (you will recall that the list transfer was mooted 10 months ago - many members think of action in hours and days rather than months)"

Related stories:

• OASIS President apologizes, says deadline won't be met
• XML-DEV's founder losing faith in OASIS
• Expanding XML-DEV beyond a mailing list