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A LOOK INSIDE

COLLABORATIVE DRAFTING

TOOL FOR 3GPP

By Sebastian Müller, ETSI Centre for Testing & Interoperability

In itself, drafting is not a difficult endeavour, • Feedback can be provided simultaneously The NWM platform is developed in parallel
it is simply taking a document from one and at any time of the day. to the ongoing trial sessions, with the focus
content state to another. to stabilize and enhance the performance
• Moderators can lock feedback forms and and the existing features, as well as adding
Of course, in the case of standardization, thus steer the document over a finish line. new features to prepare for the next
drafting is a highly complex activity due use case which will be the Collaborative
to the need for deep technical discussion, • Moderators no longer have to compile a Drafting of Documents. This use case
transparency and the desire to reach master document out of multiple versions. encompasses the following features:
consensus, often among many hundreds of They get one single document out of the
players, meeting remotely and in a highly process. • Submission, review and decision of
market-sensitive context. • Delegates can focus on providing proposed modifications.
their company statement, rather than
While Microsoft Word and Google Docs struggling with ftp uploads and Word • Integration of the (accepted)
are good for writing, they are not optimal formatting. modifications into the baseline.
when it comes to workflow, submission of • Traceability of actions, decisions and
modifications, getting feedback and making The first use case is currently under trial proposed modifications.
decisions. in 3GPP TSG RAN and its working groups,
with more than 2000 users having created In conclusion, the focus currently is on
Today, industry generally, and many 3GPP
members in particular, are looking at novel 400 documents. This trial-approach allows enabling new drafting processes and
ways of collaborative working, especially the the users to get an impression of the new adaptive workflows. However, the final goal
effective drafting of documentation. tooling and to provide feedback to the of this specification editing platform is to
NWM team. Likewise, the NWM team provide more added-value features such
The New Working Methods (NWM) project can evolve the NWM platform based on as cross-document navigation, consistent
has been set up for this purpose. the users’ feedback, monitor under real references, quality checks, comments/
conditions, and fix bugs and performance discussion threads, configurable stylesheets
issues. and data mining, to name a few.
“The first use case is
currently under trial in Interested to learn more? Visit https://nwmwiki.etsi.org/docs/index.html
3GPP TSG RAN.”

This article was co-authored by Alexandre Berge of the
The first use case of the NWM platform ETSI Centre for Testing & Interoperability.
streamlines the way 3GPP works with
Discussion Summary Documents. It allows
moderators to create documents in order
to summarize email discussions. These
documents may contain headings, figures,
rich text, tables and feedback forms. The
feedback forms are used to collect company
statements on specific questions. The
workflow foresees that the moderator
creates and updates documents, as well
as inserts feedback forms inside the
documents. Delegates post their company’s
opinion in these feedback forms.
The benefits of this approach are:

• 3GPP’s work on Discussion Summary
Documents is no longer scattered around
lots of different Word files.

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