Re: Maximum term for tech ctte members
On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 11:37:53AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Yeah; I don't think that's a bad rule in general, but I'm not convinced
> > it's a great fit for the tech-ctte. The thought experiment that makes me
> > doubt it is "if a compulsory x year break after n years of service makes
> > sense in general, shouldn't it make sense now?", or equally, "if it's
> > too painful for us to do things this way now, why won't it be equally
> > painful in future (eg if we end up appointing four members at the same
> > time, and having their terms all expire at the same time as a
> > consequence)?".
> Well, I guess my point is that I think it *is* a good idea now.
Hmm, that doesn't really get to the point I was trying to reach. How
about:
Which is more important, avoiding sudden upheavals where possible,
or ensuring individual ctte members have breaks?
If the latter's more important, then it's better not to special case
things now; if the former's more important, shouldn't whatever rule take
that into account in case we end up in a similar situation in future? If
so, then there's also no need for special casing now...
Without special casing, it might be hard to reconstitute the ctte from
just Coin and Keith (assuming terms of less than six years) if all the
existing members were unavailable to be re-included. I don't know that
it'd actually be that hard though -- they could just appoint two members
initially to get up to the constitutionally recommended "at least 4",
then add to that over the next few years to get up to a steady state of
8 ctte members with 2 appointed each year...
An approach like:
> > If we want the opportunity to appoint new members regularly, rather than
> > expire old members per se, we could just say that: "on July 1st, the two
> > longest serving ctte members' term expires" to end up with (on average)
> > four year terms... [...]
would work for avoiding sudden upheavals where possible (if everyone
resigned simultaneously, you're still stuck, eg), but still supports
reviewing or cycling through members, IMO. Any thoughts on that sort
of approach?
> > I would have thought deliberate scaling would make more sense than
> > random assignment, eg, "tech ctte members have four year terms; for the
> > purpose of this rule the existing members are deemed to have been
> > appointed at:
> > Ian, Bdale: 2010-12-01 (expiry 2014-11-30)
> > Andi, Steve: 2011-12-01 (expiry 2015-11-30)
> > Russ, Don: 2012-12-01 (expiry 2016-11-30)
> > Colin, Keith: 2013-12-01 (expiry 2017-11-30)
> > "
> I was not particularly clear on what I meant by random assignment. What I
> had intended was to designate six artificial "start of term" points in the
> past four years and then have all the members who have served for over
> four years to just draw those out of a hat. Not completely randomly
> generating a start date.
Colin's already at 2.75 years; so if the artificial start-of-term points
weren't limited to being between, say, May 2010 and Aug 2011, you'd have
some of the oldbies' terms expiring after Colin, despite being appointed
before Colin. If you did set them all in that 15 month period, you'd still
have 6 of 8 ctte members terms expiring in, well, the next 15 months --
which seems about as bad as having them all expire now to me. Less of
a problem with longer terms, though.
BTW, I've been using four years because it's a nice round number and
reasonably short; did you think it was a good number, or were you just
using it as an example too? Based on how long current folks have been
on the ctte, I could see 8 years being plausible too, though anything
more than that seems overly long to me.
Cheers,
aj
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