[J3] Upcoming Letter Ballot regarding Emeritus Member attendance at J3 meeting 224

[Brian Friesen]

Hello everyone,

at J3 meeting 223, the committee approved papers 21-130r1 and 21-131r1
to recommend to the INCITS Secretariat to award Emeritus Member status
to Dan Nagle and Van Snyder, respectively.

I learned from INCITS recently that the committee must also make a
separate recommendation to the Secretariat to recommend that Dan and
Van be allowed to attend the J3 portions of joint J3/WG5 meetings,
including meeting 224 in June 2021, assuming the Secretariat indeed
confers Emeritus Member status on each of them. The reason for this
requirement is that INCITS prohibits Emeritus Members from
participating in international activities, including WG5 meetings, so
there is some ambiguity regarding how the rules apply to the joint
J3/WG5 meetings. J3 is required to vote on this issue for each WG5
meeting, so you should expect to see this issue return one per year
the future too, for as long as J3 has Emeritus Members.

Had I known that J3 was required to vote on this issue, I would have
made it a separate paper at meeting 223 so we could address it then,
and will remember to do so in the future. However, having failed to do
so at meeting 223, the compromise is to issue an INCITS Letter Ballot
to vote on this before meeting 224. This will hopefully be the only
time we ever have to use a LB to vote on this issue.

Therefore, you can expect to receive a Letter Ballot from INCITS in
the next few days. Letter Ballots are typically open for 14 days. If
you have not voted on a LB before, the steps are:
  - navigate to incits.org and click "Member Login" in the upper right corner
  - log in with your incits.org credentials
  - click the "Groups" tab in the upper left, then click "PL22.3 -
Programming Language Fortran"
  - click the "Ballots" link in the upper middle of the page

You will see there is already a LB with status "Pending" regarding the
topic described above. When the LB wordsmithing has concluded, its
status will change to "Open" or something like that. You can then
click on the LB, read the text, and cast your vote.