Re: Maximum term for tech ctte members
Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au> writes:
> Would anyone else be supportive of a proposal to set a term for tech
> ctte membership?
I just mentioned this today in our TC meeting, so obviously I've been
thinking along these lines as well and have been wondering if this would
be a good idea.
> I think set terms, with no term limits would make sense (ie, you're
> appointed to the ctte, you stay on it for X years, then you either say
> "thanks, but enough's enough" or "that was fun, I'd like to keep doing
> it" and the ctte and DPL considers whether to reappoint you in the usual
> fashion.
Other bodies of this type take a variation on this approach (and of the
reappointment rule you propose below) that I quite like: after each term,
that member may not be reappointed for some period. For example, we could
say that members serve for four years, and after that four-year period
they cannot be reappointed to the TC for at least two years.
The primary goal of this sort of system is to rotate fresh people through
the decision-making body. This has multiple advantages. It gives people
a break and a clean break point where they can stop without any perceived
implications of resigning, so they can either decide they've done enough
or they can come back refreshed and with fresh eyes. It encourages some
of our most senior members to take more time for work on the project
instead of project governance, similar to constantly changing the DPL,
which may also provide improved perspective on some issues. It gives far
more people an opportunity to serve on the TC, which both benefits them
and benefits the project as a whole by providing a constant rotation of
fresh perspectives. It can help break the body out of any subtle
group-think that it may have developed from working together for so long.
Obviously, each of us can independently decide to do this on our own (and
I've been considering doing so regardless), but I think there are some
real benefits in making this our process instead of asking individuals to
do it voluntarily. It makes the whole turnover process more reliable and
more consistent for the project and encourages development of mechanisms
for selecting good people for the committee.
I think our DPL selection process works extremely well and benefits
greatly from having a yearly election. Selecting a new TC member took a
long time, and there are strong incentives in the current system to make
cautious and conservative decisions on new members because members
effectively serve for life. (It's the US Supreme Court justice selection
problem, essentially.) I'm not sure that's best for the project. If we
were rotating members more frequently, there would be less perceived risk
in each member selection, and we would get better at the process.
> Personally, I think 3 or 4 year terms ought to be long enough, but that
> would mean kicking everyone but Colin and Keith off the ctte
> immediately. Terms of 6-8 years would leave half the current ctte around
> to reconstitute the ctte. With a term of 16 years (which no member has
> exceeded yet), a new member would have to be voted on once every two
> years on average to maintain a full 8-member ctte.
One approach we could take to this would be to randomly assign each
existing member (except maybe Keith and Colin) to an artificial "start of
term" date distributed across the past three or four years, for the
purposes of deciding when our current term ends. That would build in some
transition time and spread new member selection out in a sustainable way.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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