CA Baseline Governance Call - Still Happening 11/10

Hey folks - we previously discussed cancelling the CA Baseline Gov call this Friday, however something has come up related to governance and canonical conventions that we felt would be helpful to discuss this Friday. So the call is back on.

Huge thankful for Elliot's thoughtful framing of the topic below:
During a review of CA Baseline, and as we think forward to a potential HL7 Canada ballot of the IG, it was discovered that there is currently an HL7 International approval process for canonical URLs within hl7.org domain, including the canonical URLs being used by CA Baseline that start with hl7.org/fhir/ca/baseline. Apparently, CA Baseline does not have that approval.

As a reminder, canonical URLs are how profiles, extensions, ValueSet, CodeSystems, and other conformance resources are "named": a resource claims conformance to a profile by including the profile's canonical URL in the resource's meta.profile element; a code value is identified as coming from a particular CodeSystem, by setting the coding.system element to the CodeSystem's canonical URL; etc.

Broadly speaking, we have three options:

• Pursue HL7 international approval and continue using the canonical. We think this would have the lowest impact on users of CA Baseline (authors of derivative IGs and implementers). However, this approach may impose some process constraints on continued development of CA Baseline, and it isn't clear we can get approval.
• Change resources within CA Baseline to use a base canonical not under HL7 International's control. We suspect this will have an impact on users of CA Baseline, although the extent of the impact is not clear, and there may be steps users can take to mitigate the effect. This approach probably minimizes HL7 International's constraints on how we continue to develop CA Baseline.
• Continue to use the current canonicals, contrary to HL7 International's policy. In the short term, this wouldn't impact either users of CA Baseline or our continued development of it; but it is unclear how this would play out in the longer term.

An advantage of the first two options is that we could set up redirects from URLs under hl7.org/fhir/ca/baseline to the resource definitions/descriptions; we wouldn't be able to do that under the third option. Under the third option, anyone building CA Baseline using the IG publisher will get build warnings related to workgroup sponsorship.

For reference, HL7 Germany uses canonical URLs in their implementation guides starting with hl7.de and doesn't require HL7 International approval. Similarly, HL7 Australia canonicals start with hl7.org.au/fhir. On the other hand, HL7 Interational has a US-realm steering committee that oversees approval of canonical URLs starting with hl7.org/fhir/us.

Obviously, this isn't an ideal situation, but we need feedback from implementers and IG authors to help inform our approach going forward.