Re: Social Committee proposal

[Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net>]

Hi all,

Andreas Tille sent me some good comments in private mail, and I answered
him, but the answers are not private per se, so here go a few more aspects:

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The committee should have legalese in the constitution, but also an initial
charter-like document that explains all the possible pitfalls. This should
be attached to the vote proposal in order to summarize the discussion from
-project to all those who will vote.

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We actually have ample precedent that we can generally get along nicely
when thinking about ourselves socially - witness the successful Debian
Conferences held each year. Sure, there are problems with them, but we
manage to pull off this social gathering every time, in all sorts of
different places and contexts.

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Besides, we can always repeal the committee with the same kind of GR that
would introduce it.

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On the topic of whether the members of the committee would be too
technically-inclined or too socially-inclined, and how the leader seems
always to be a most technically apt person:

If given a choice to pick exactly 1 person for the most honorable position -
all of us will prefer the highly technically skilled person.
This will never change, nor should it!

But, if given a choice to pick 16 people for a position like this,
we won't necessarily find 16 highly technically skilled people,
nor will we necessarilly all agree on the exact set of them.

So we might end up with many technically skilled people in the soc-ctte, but
also some socially skilled people.

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The selection of people should also happen to reflect the kind of people the
developer body is composed of.

[Continuing on that note, there is a concern that representative democracy
doesn't really make for an accurate representation...]

In normal political systems you normally elect a party, which is represented
by a few figureheads, and then when they come to power, they distribute
their vote percentage onto all their members.

Also, those things scale to much larger values, so there's more opportunity
for abuse because people don't know each other.

With a 16 member soc-ctte, our ratio voters/elected is just 62.5, whereas in
real life people are excited to get the ratio down to 200 in villages, but
it's usually much, much higher.

In our elections, similar to the elections for the SPI board, we would not
be electing any parties, but exact people with exact names and platforms and
all. That is inherently better.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.