Re: soc-ctte discussion at DebConf7 [was Re: Social committee proposal]
On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 09:15:25AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > * Someone proposed that the leader makes the initial list of members which
> > would then be voted upon, not sure; I would maintain my position that
> > people should be nominating themselves, rather than the leader naming
> > them - I don't believe we clarified this point
>
> I don't know who did this proposal but letting the leader pick the soc-ctte
> people out of a number of people that explicitely volunteered to work in the
> soc-ctte (it makes no sense to pick people that do not volunteer to do some
> work) might be a resonable alternative.
I have an issue with the leader deciding on the composition of the
committee, in general. I think it could easily create the impression
that they are his cronies, and we have to avoid that.
I don't think that all other methods involving nominations and voting are
such an unbearable overhead.
> BTW, we did not discuss whether certain positions should exclude that a
> person is a member of the soc-ctte at the same time. For instance I'm
> unsure whether the leader should be a member at the same time which might
> perfectly happen under some circumstances if we decide that soc-ctte stays
> for two years stable and one of its members is successfully running for DPL.
I think that there's plenty of people in Debian for us to have different
people in different positions at all times :) 7/1000 or 15/1000 is tiny.
> > The opposition to the idea of not having any vetting of candidates was
> > that there would be no accountability, no way to remove people who are
> > perceived to be bad, or inactive.
> > Proposal to address this was to have yearly approval voting of soc-ctte
> > members, whereby the developers would be able to tick off a particular
> > member and remove them that way.
>
> For these case I'd alternatively suggest kind of a soc-ctte internal voting
> mechanism to sort out those who shouldn't be a member for whatever reason
> quickly.
Obviously, yes. But even then, the people outside might not see things
the same way as the other members of the committee, and they have to have
a method of voicing this opinion other than a rowdy flamewar on the
mailing list or a GR explicitly condemning some member. That's just ugly.
> > It wasn't particularly clear what would be done after that (mostly by
> > time constraints during the discussion...); how much non-approval
> > would the members have to get in order to get removed; whether the
> > removed members would have to be replaced, when and how would the
> > replacement be done (appointment by leader? and then voting?). It was
> > also proposed that only one half of the committee members go up for
> > this kind of an approval vote each year.
>
> The reason was that we need some kind of stability. IMHO we do not have
> such a high frequency of "soc-ctte business cases" (furtunately) that
> members have a chance to gather some experience in this business.
Oh, and I should mention that people seemed to be a bit unaware of
the fact that I had two years set for elections, rather than one,
which is another method to have more stability. Especially if combined
with that half-half rule Andreas mentioned.
(In general, I got the distinct impression that many people couldn't be
bothered to read long threads followed by diffs to the constitution.
Can't blame them, really :)
--
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