Re: Initial draft proposed consitutution (v0.1)

[Tyson Dowd <trd@stimpy.cs.mu.oz.au>]

On 19-Mar-1998, Ian Jackson <leader@debian.org> wrote:
> I have put my first draft of a constitution (decisionmaking procedure)
> up on the www at
> <URL:http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/debian-organisation.html>
> 
> Please comment on it - here on debian-devel, please, rather than by
> private email.

I have a few comments.  

In 6.3:

	4.No detailed design work. 

	Then Technical Committee does not engage in design of new
	proposals and policies. Such design work should be carried out
	by individuals privately or together and discussed in ordinary
	technical policy and design forums. 

	The Technical Committee restricts itself to choosing from or
	adopting compromises between solutions and decisions which have
	been proposed and reasonably thoroughly discussed elsewhere. 

I assume this is supposed to stop the committee doing designs as
"the committee".  If individuals *that are in the committee* are 
still free to work on design/policy outside of their committee role,
perhaps this should be stated a little bit more explicitly.

	5.Technical Committee makes decisions only as last resort. 

	The Technical Committee does not make a technical decision until
	efforts to resolve it via consensus have been tried and failed. 

This conflicts with 6.1 which states that the tech. committee can
make decisions when asked to, and can overrule developers, etc.

Perhaps it should be made clear when the tech committee is the natural
decision maker, and when they need to be the decision maker of
last resort.  I'm not clear on when they are expected to make decisions.
Also, some definition of "tried and failed" seems needed, although 
it need not be formal.

Also, I'm not clear on the role of Delegates -- what is with them
kicking people out? Why can't the PM do that? Do the developers
get a say in that? I'm not saying it's wrong, but some rationale
might be good for this.

Otherwise it seems like it's coming along nicely.  Would you
expect a degree of automation/process to vote calling/vote
counting?  Should that be in this document or elsewhere?

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # So I asked Sarah: what's the serial number on
                            # your computer? She replied:
     trd@cs.mu.oz.au        #          A-C-2-4-0-V-/-5-0-H-Z
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #


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