Re: Social Committee proposal
On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 09:07:34PM -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.
> Given that once codified, style, usability, and social
> polices (well, almost any policy) tends to get more and more chiseled
> in stone; creating a social policy is not in the Nay^H^Hprojects best
> interest, perhaps.
>
> No, I am not sure I fully believe this, but it is a point that
> should be considered as we dash headlong towards creating a social
> committee and social policy to mirror the technical committee and
> technical policy and constitutional amendments to chisel it into the
> codex.
Granted. Yet, I think that similar arguments must have been levelled in
the early days against having a technical committee. Why did we need that,
couldn't we all just get along? :)
Self-regulation has worked for us for years, in both areas, after all.
Maybe making changes isn't in our best interest.
Yet, we've been pretty conservative about social matters for years now,
i.e. we didn't tend to innovate in the community all that much. Having
a committee for these matters won't really change any long-entrenched
practices that people already practice, but it will provide a reasonable
forum for discussion. (Before anyone says "but this is also a reasonable
forum for discussion", I will just remind that this is a 694-member
mailing list, just think about that a bit...)
I sense a slightly increasing dissatisfaction among the various people for
various reasons, and I tend to notice a pattern: the most annoying of the
reasons are the non-technical reasons. Yes, non-objective topics are
inherently more emotional, and yes, it would be nice if we could just make
them go away. But we can't, we have to cope with them. We've been doing that
individually so far, let's try structurally now.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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