Re: Technical committee resolution

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Joey Hess writes ("Re: Technical committee resolution"):
> Ian Jackson wrote:
> > The causes seem to include:
> 
> Isn't the main cause that the Technical Committee is well, a committee?
> (Recall the old saying about many heads and no brain.)
> That seems to be the core reason for all the problems you listed.

Well, perhaps, but online committees which do their business by
mailing list work very differently to in-person ones (or even IRC
meeting ones).  There is a much greater emphasis on discursive
argument, and much more time for consideration.

Or to put it another way: would you care to be more specific about
what the failure modes are which are due to the committee structure ?

> >  * Increasing the size of the committee to provide more available
> >    energy and effort
> 
> If the problem is that it's a committe, that won't work.

Whether that's true depends on whether the committeeish failure modes
which are relevant to the TC are exacerbated by increasing its size.

The normal reason why increasing the size of a committee makes it work
less well, is that everyone has to have their say in each meeting and
everyone gets bored and doesn't pay attention, and everyone feels they
have to vote on each issue but they don't know about them, and so on.

These aren't problems we suffer from at the moment and adding people
doesn't seem likely to help.

But if you have other suggestions on how things could be improved I'd
be very happy to hear it.  If you don't think it's good that the TC is
a committee, how should we try to solve the problems instead that the
TC is currently supposed to solve (but which it is currently failing
at) ?

Ian.