guidelines and procedures for IVOA document management

[Robert Hanisch]

Please review the new IVOA Note entitled "Guidelines and Procedures for IVOA
Document Standards Management," which can be viewed at the URL:

    http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/DocStdProc.html

This Note attempts to capture the sense of the IVOA Executive when, at its
January 2004 meeting, it asked that the IVOA document collection be tidied
up and some procedures be put in place to avoid confusion between
works-in-progress and published Working Drafts.

I ask you particularly to comment on the following points:

o  We propose a version numbering system that uses the format #.##.  Details
are explained in the Note.  This is slightly more constraining than a
proposal circulated by Ray Plante a few days ago, but is hopefully easy for
everyone to understand.

o  We ask working groups to develop new Working Drafts using a standard
template, a template which helps to distinguish works-in-progress from
published documents.  Working Drafts are published to the IVOA document
collection only when ready for wider review, and then the Document
Coordinator updates formats to conform to the IVOA standards.  Authors will
not have to change text or formatting AT ALL as documents are promoted
through the system.

o  We somewhat mix use of date formats, e.g., 15 March 2004 for main
headings, but
ISO 8601 format (2004-03-15) for time-stamps.  Personally I'd prefer to use
ISO 8601 throughout; it just seems to me to be a good practice.  But I will
not push it if others do not particularly care.

Thank you,

Bob Hanisch
Chair, IVOA Standards and Processess Working Group