Re: Social Committee proposal

[Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net>]

On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 08:31:57AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>  This kind of accountability implies several tacit points:
>  1) the committee has some power (whatever those powers may be),
>  3) that serving on the committee is a privilege

It might be worth noting here that I think that even the single ability to
make statements as a member of a constitutional committee is powerful enough
to be something to require accountability. That is, even if we strip it off
most of the powers as MJ seemed to imply earlier, it's still a noteworthy
privilege to be able to do that in our community.

>         The bad thing about elections, though, is that they do tend to
>  promote what we call politics; this is because if  you do not have a
>  clear measure of performance, it is highly unlikely you have any
>  predictive MOPs either.

I agree that it's always a possibility that elections convert into a messy
popularity contest.

This should be alleviated by the fact that we're directly picking a larger
number of people via a non-trivial election method, so those who accumulate
fans as an agenda should experience the natural effect of also accumulating
foes who see through their self-promotion, i.e. it will backfire on them.

I hope that this will result in a more meek committee, and since it's a
*social* committee, it's a much better default for its members to be meek
than for them to be fierce.

I was using some rather explicit/extreme terms in the above paragraphs - it
is more likely than not that in Debian we won't see these corner cases, but
they should be accounted for, just in case.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.