Re: Social Committee proposal
On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 07:25:49PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> >If given a choice to pick exactly 1 person for the most honorable
> >position - all of us will prefer the highly technically skilled person.
>
> All with exception of at least one (me): I would try to pick
> the person that promisses to fullfill the most honorable
> position. I would not regard the technical skills highest
> if the position does not primarily needs technical skills.
>
> >This will never change, nor should it!
>
> I was not really aware that this is the case.
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of people who are so disillusioned
with promises that they don't really listen to stories, but instead
concentrate on past action from a candidate. And since the main past action
that usually happens is technical excellence, that ends up being the
main criterion.
> >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.
>
> Well, this sounds black and white: We need socially skilled
> people. The fact that they are socially skilled does not
> necessary exclude that they are technically perfect.
Yes, you're right, I painted it too much black and white. What I really
meant as 'technically skilled' was 'primarily technically skilled and not
particularly socially skilled', and analogous for the other one.
But maybe we strayed from the point there - I was just trying to address the
point you previously made about how soc-ctte might become ignored by
'techies' because they don't regard the 'non-techies' highly - while
possible, I don't think it will become a problem, because of two reasons:
the first reason is that, by analogy with the DPL election, it will
inevitably be firstly techies who will get elected to soc-ctte. The second
reason is that the number of seats and the voting mechanism should work to
ensure that all kinds of people will be represented in the soc-ctte, so it
won't be a group exclusively composed of any single kind of people.
> I guess you rather mean we need to include also people that are in
> technical positions that are cruxial for Debian to keep the contact
> between the soc-ctte and technical core groups as close as possible.
That will also be a rationale used by some of the voters, I'm sure. :)
> >The selection of people should also happen to reflect the kind of people
> >the developer body is composed of.
>
> Problem: I've got the impression that Debian is a herd of
> people showing very individual strengthes and that it is
> hard to find or even to identify the "kind of people in
> Debian". (BTW, this is one thing I really like at DebConf
> meetings to be amongst very interesting people you will not
> meet in every day life in this concentration.)
I guess that's true. But we'll just deal with it as best we can
(as we do in day to day operations, anyway).
(A cynic would say that it's the showing of 'very individual strengths' that
got us to the point where we need to think more about social issues... :)
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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