Bug#636783: Constitutional Amendment: Permit TC to hold informal private conversations

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

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1. The Debian Technical Committee hereby exercises its power in
   4.2(1) of the Debian Constitution to propose the following
   General Resolution:

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   Constitutional Amendment: Permit TC to hold informal private conversations

   On a number of occasions recently, enquirers have emailed TC
   members' personal addreses to informally seek members' views.  This
   has worked well; however it is not clear that Constitution permits
   it.  This situation should be regularised.

   On occasion the TC has been asked to decide on maintainership of
   packages.  It is very difficult to hold the necessary discussions,
   which inevitably involve discussion of personalities, in public.

   At the moment the TC is unable to take on a mediation role, since
   mediation necessarily involves each party to a dispute conversing
   privately with the mediator.  The TC should be able to mediate if
   the TC, and parties to a dispute, wish it to do so.

   Actual decisionmaking must still place in public of course.

   Therefore, amend the Debian Constitution 6.3 as follows (wdiff -i):

     3. Public [-discussion and-] decision-making.

	[-Discussion,-]
	Draft resolutions and amendments, and votes by members of the
	committee, are made public on the Technical Committee public
	discussion list. There is no separate secretary for the
	Committee.

        [+<cite>The Technical Committee should limit private
        discussions to situations where holding the conversation in
        public would be infeasible or counterproductive.</cite>+]

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2. It is not practical for the TC to vote to accept/reject individual
   amendments to the GR proposal.  The TC would wish to delegate its
   power to accept amendments, to avoid needing the collection of
   sponsors for uncontroversial changes.  However the Secretary has
   advised that this is not constitutionally acceptable.

   Therefore, to achieve roughly the same effect, the TC makes the
   following promise.  If any TC member gives notice that the TC
   accepts an amendment, then at least one of the following will
   happen:

     (a) the TC will use its own power under A.1(1) to arrange that
         the amendment appears on the GR ballot as an option;

     (b) the TC will use its power under A.1(1) to propose and
         its power under A.1(2) to accept the amendment, so that
         the amendment is incorporated in the version voted on; or

     (c) A member of the TC will publicly notify the amendment's
         proposer that the amendment will not be accepted after all.
         In this case TC will wait at least 7 more days before calling
         for a vote, to give time for the amendment's proposer to
         collect sponsors.

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