Public Comment phase

The Public Comment phase is between successful publication of a Public Comment ready content and publication of the results of Public Comment resolution (e.g. Trial Implementation). During this phase IHE needs all changes to the content to be tracked for why the change was made. This may be because of a Public Comment, or a comment submitted by committee members during review. This is best accomplished using GitHub change tracking, and GitHub Issues to document why the change was made.

This instructions is focused on use of GitHub for revision control, and GitHub Issues for change tracking. This is not a mandatory process for IHE. If your committee chooses a different process then this article does not apply.

Receiving Public Comment

There are two different ways that the public can submit Public Comment. There are two ways because the GitHub method is both new, and requires membership in the IHE managed GitHub team.

1. Use of the classic IHE web site Public Comment form. This has the advantage of being completely open to the public. It also has the advantage of allowing the comment to submit a spreadsheet of multiple comments. Lastly it is the comfortable way for the public to comment.
2. Use of the GitHub Issue submission. This can have a template that covers all the same attributes as the form. This has the advantage of going right into the GitHub repository for tracking, and has comment and revision support.

Processing the Comments

TODO: One way is to put all comments into the GitHub Issues. No method for this import is available.

GitHub updates

Given that this process is for Public Comment processing, the expectation is that all changes should be tracked as to WHY the change was made. This is easiest when the GitHub Issues are used as one just includes the number of the issue in the comment.

The committee can choose if they want to force Pull-Requests or not. Often changes that are not controversial can be simply submitted directly, where as a Pull-Request might be more helpful when the author would like the committee to be explicitly aware of the change.

TODO ....