The UCUM Organization Charter and Bylaws

Mission

To publish, maintain and promote the Unified Code for Units of Measure.

Members

The UCUM Organization is a volunteer organizations that recognizes members based on their contribution to the mission of the Organization. The following roles are recognized.

1. The Public: is everyone interested in UCUM, observers, users, etc. The public are not yet members but are eligible to become members of the UCUM Organization.
2. Member of the Web Site: the UCUM work is centered around its web site unitsofmeasure.org. The published material is open for the public to view and download, etc. but in order to engage with proposals and discussions one must register as a member. To register go to the web site and search the word Register on the top menu or directly go to the URL http://unitsofmeasure.org/trac/register. Registered members may view and submit tickets. The chief process of interacting with the UCUM organization is through tickets.
3. Verified Member: someone who has contributed meaningfully with a proposal or thoughtful question (usually by submitting a relevant ticket) should be promoted to become a verified member. Promotion to verified member should be performed manually by a member with administrator privilege, and in the future automatically, whenever a reviewer of the user input determines the input as relevant, such as by accepting a ticket into consideration.
4. Board of Advisor: the decision making body of the UCUM Organization is the Board of Advisors (or in short "the board"). The Board of Advisors may elect other members to the board by a simple majority. The duties of a member of the Board of Advisors are to engage in the decision making process of the UCUM Organization. Decisions may be technical or organizational in nature. To be eligible to become a member of the Board of Advisor, an individual must
   • have expertise in a relevant subject matter of units of measures
   • must understand the technical subject matter to be able to
     • adjudicate changes and
     • explain the technical reasoning behind changes.
   • must have been and continue to be supportive of UCUM
     • must promote and not undermine UCUM when being involved of competing activity
     A member of the Board of Advisors should be actively contributing commensurable to the actual activity of the UCUM Organization.
5. Administrator: a member may have administrator privileges which allow them to manage the web site content and assign privileges to other members.
6. Chairman of the Board: the Board of Advisers elects a Chairman of the Board.
7. Ex Officio and Honorary Member: the Board has
   • one ex-officio member who is a member of the Regenstrief Institute, Inc., the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. being the Copyright holder of UCUM along with the UCUM Organization.
   • the Founders, Gunther Schadow and Clem McDonald?, are members of the board until their resignation.
8. Secretary: volunteers or employees of organizational volunteers who offer clerical and organizational management services to the UCUM organization are recognized as secretaries. A secretary may be given administrator privileges on the web site. Secretary is a title recognized and granted by the Board of Advisors, who may elect and remove secretaries. A secretary is not automatically an ex-officio member of the Board of Advisors and has no voting privileges.
9. Editor: are members with write access to the UCUM specification repository and the ability to apply changes to the UCUM specification and the publishing of updated versions. Editors are added or removed by the Board of Advisors and must be board members or secretaries.

Decision Making

It is in the nature of the field of Units of Measure that it is very stable and maintenance activity may be very low. For this reason, the UCUM Organization is constituted as a light-weight organization. The central interaction device for all decision making is an active management web site, http://unitsofmeasure.org. Face to face or telephone meetings are held minimal. There are no standing meetings.

All decisions are made by the Board of Advisors by simple majority.

Decisions which alter the structure or bylaws of the organization or grant roles such as secretaries and editors must be made with at least the chairman of the board, one ex-officio member present and two other board members voting (not abstaining) in a real time discussion via telephone or per discussion convened electronically on the web site. All members of the Board of Advisors must be notified with motions to change bylaws or organization submitted in writing on the web site at least 30 days prior to the voting.

Technical Decisions are made on tickets by at least 2 board members documenting assent to the proposal. When only one board member engages in the adjudication and no other board member weighs in in opposition, the decision of the single member may be implemented. However, decisions by a single member cannot bind the UCUM Organization to implement this decision if the single member so deciding does not himself implement the decision.

All technical decisions are made on a ticket which may be submitted by any Member of the UCUM organization (even non-verified new members). A ticket must be accepted by a board members to be turned into action. Any verified member can comment on tickets by commenting on the ticket. Board members can decide on the ticket status.

The process of action on a technical ticket is as follows:

1. A board member or secretary reviews the request and triages it.
   • Possibly revising the category.
   • Drafting a quick excerpt of the essence of the request and proposes one of the determinations:
2. Accept, in which case the board member or secretary will be the owner and make a concrete change proposal to the specification.
   • A ticket cannot be accepted without a concrete change proposal to the specification.
   • Other board members should review and opine to the change.
   • If the proposal was accepted by a secretary, at least one board member must approve the proposal.
3. Reject, in which case the board member or secretary will give a rationale to the proposal to reject.
   • The status of such tickets are "reject_proposed".
   • At least one other board member needs to agree with the rejection proposal, in which case the next status will be "wontfix" (will not change).
   • The member who submitted the ticket may provide further comment and justification, thus disputing the rejection decision.
   • If the rejection decision is disputed, another board member may adopt the ticket and take it to Reconsider status, but such board member must then accept the responsibility of seeing the change request through.
     • A proposal for reconsideration must be actionable, it must explain how the issue can be resolved, how the concerns of the rejecting board member can be addressed, the emphasis is how not just why.
4. Other statuses may exist to determine that the request is not actionable or doesn't identify a specific change need, is out of scope or suggests a problem that is not a real problem. These determinations can be made by one board member or secretary.

The web site can be used to create ticket reports. The "timeline" function of the web site, and most ticket information can only be seen by registered users, this is necessary and highly effective to prevent ticket spam, i.e., by removing the pay-off for a spammer to place spam tickets: links they place in their spam tickets will not end up on search engines.

Specification

The UCUM specification's source code is maintained in a Subversion (SVN) repository. Write access to the Subversion repository is granted to editors who can apply changes to the specification and produce a new release.