Re: Maximum term for tech ctte members
Philip Hands writes ("Re: Maximum term for tech ctte members"):
> I also wonder what is to be done about someone coming to the end of
> their term during the middle of an ongoing discussion. How well do you
> (Ian) think you'd have coped if you knew that the recent decisions had
> to come to a vote by a particular date, otherwise you'd lose your vote?
> I doubt that would have made things better.
This is a good point.
> Perhaps one could say that anyone on the TC at the start of a discussion
> gets to stay for the duration (if they want to, perhaps), but what about
> a series of votes as we saw recently?
Perhaps the answer is to embed the term limit not in the Constitution,
but to agree it by resolution of the TC itself. That way if there is
a particularly controversial vote coming up, the TC could delay the
term expiry. I think this situation would be rare.
Doing the term limit as a standing decision of the TC will also make
it easier to (a) experiment with different approaches (b) deal with
edge cases.
For example, I think it would be very helpful to allow the outgoing TC
member to vote in the ballot on their own replacement. That's
difficult to do with a constitutional term limit.
> I suppose what constitutes the same discussion could be a decision for
> the committee, or perhaps the chair, but that might well just end up
> being another thing to argue about if the issue is already contentious.
I think we could probably come up with a wording to deal with this
which I hope the TC members as a whole would interpret honestly.
Ian.
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