Re: Technical committee resolution

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 23:46 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> 
> > Neither is the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that
> > because it's likely there are better ways of doing things than the way
> > we're doing things now (ie, "though foo is the way we've always done
> > things, there probably exists some bar that is better than foo"), we
> > should look at new ways of doing things in the hopes that we'll find one
> > of them that's better that we can then incorporate into our traditions.
> 
> One of the amazing things about humans that distinguishes them from, say,
> lumps of rock is that humans are capable of learning and exploring new
> ideas and trying new things.  Hence, it turns out that a group of people
> can look at new ways of doing things without changing the people.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that currently the project has no way of
dealing with people who refuse to look at new ways of doing things.

It is true that "drop the oldest person" is randomish.  What we have now
is *equally* random; it presumes that the person already on the
committee is a better member than anyone else that could be found.

I suggest that the best way to have good people on the committee is to
have some process by which one person or group of people get to decide
that it's time to replace person X with person Y, and not simply wait
around for person X to resign.

This is, fundamentally, what distinguishes a democracy from an
autocracy.  

Thomas