Re: Social Committee proposal

[Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net>]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 03:35:14PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> You see, the committee is going to define the norms. It is going to
> >> lay down the acceptable cultural mores. In my experience,
> >> committees never produce minimalist documents. The never know when
> >> to stop. Design by committee is what gave us ADA.
> 
> > Er, do we see this pattern with the technical committee? The social
> > committee would (by virtue of shared demographics) be composed of a
> > similarly-minded people as the technical committee, so it stands to
> > reason that they wouldn't act horribly different from one another.
> 
>         I am not sure that follows. Case in point: while I think I am
>  a reasonably good fit for the role required for a tech ctte member
>  (if I were not, I would have resigned a long time ago), wil horses
>  would not drag me to a social committee. I don't think I fit the
>  demographic.
> 
>         Another thing is, that we are all self selected to put
>  together a yet-another-son-of-multics OS -- that is a pretty narrow,
>  tightly couple technical field, so we are all pretty close in the
>  technical domain.  In other dimensions, liek geography, religion,
>  language, cultture, politics -- we are all over the field. We've got
>  liberal members, conservative members, left wing, right wing --- and
>  given that, I don't think it is easy to come to a consensus and not
>  impose majority will.

Ah, true, but we do have one important social thing that makes close in that
domain, too - the thirteen years of social interaction within the Debian
Project, and many if not most participants also have personal experience in
many years within those thirteen years.

We must be guided by that.

On related note, again, I wonder if it would make sense to impose a modicum
of ratios on tenure for serving in the soc-ctte. Perhaps it would make sense
to require that at least 1/3 of all elected candidates have been members of
the project for at least Y/2 years, where Y is the age of the project? That
wouldn't hamper the 'newbies' too much, but it would bring a modicum of
balance that we can reasonably expect from people with seniority.

>         Well, the technical committee is passive. It does not actively
>  make policy.

Err, didn't I say that the social committee would do the same?

Indeed, I mainly modelled the proposed constitution ammendment after the
wording for the same passive technical committee.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.