Re: Technical committee resolution
Anthony Towns writes ("Technical committee resolution"):
> I've been thinking for a while [0] it'd be good to do a real revamp of
> the tech ctte. It's been pretty dysfunctional since forever, there's
> not much that can be done internally to improve things, and since it's
> almost entirely self-appointed and has no oversight whatsoever the only
> way to change things externally is constitutional change.
The real situation is that the TC couldn't decide which end to leave a
paper bag through without arguing for six months about whether the
bottom had also been torn open - and perhaps not even then.
Somehow in this paragraph AJ manages to start from there and conclude
that the real problem is that the TC is too powerful and
unaccountable.
I do think the problems with the TC are structural. Because the TC
has to be constitutionaly established, that does mean we need a
constitutional change to fix things.
Part of the problem is that we have too few active members. This
should be fixed IMO both by increasing the number of members, and by
making it easier to get rid of inactive members.
Or to put it another way, the problem isn't lack of new blood, it is
lack of involvement. We should be removing TC members who are
inactive or often wrong.
I would be happy for the TC to have to reconfirm its own membership
periodically, on a rolling basis, but it would have to be done by
secret ballot obviously.
And, just to make things personal, I submit that one of the problems
is AJ. I have found his contributions I generally unhelpful. Most
recently we have had the spectacle of AJ deciding that it is wrong for
the TC to override the maintainer, no matter how clear it is that the
maintainer is wrong, unless the bug is release critical.
AJ says that what is needed is `new blood'. I suspect that part of
what he means is that he wants rid of me.
Ian.
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