Re: Maximum term for tech ctte members
Hi,
On 21/10/14 at 17:41 +0000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Membership of the Technical Committee is automatically reviewed on
> the 1st of January of each year. At this time, the terms of the N
> most senior members automatically expire provided they were appointed
> at least 4.5 years ago. N is defined as 2-R (if R < 2) or 0 (if R >=
> 2). R is the number of former members of the Technical Committee who
> have resigned, or been removed or replaced within the previous twelve
> months.
Something just occurred to me.
Given the wide range of questions brought to the TC, it makes sense to
have some diversity in the TC in order to have expertise at hand
covering all the possible questions. Some members might be more familiar
with say, porting issues, packages inter-dependencies issues, low-level
stuff, desktop environments or might have a tendancy to approach
problems with a sysadmin POV, or with a developer POV.
When replacing two members at a time, it might be a bit difficult to
take that desirable balance into consideration. For example, if there are
three candidates A - B - C in the shortlist, and A and B are basically
clones in terms of profile, it would make sense to choose (A OR B) AND
C. If the final decision is made via a vote, it could require to vote on
pairs of candidates.
I don't know if this is a problem that can be ignored (because so far,
we have always found members with a wide range of expertise) or one that
should be addressed somehow. One way to address it would be to serialize
the process by re-evaluating membership every 6 months rather than
annually, and expiring at most one member at a time. This would add
overhead (more frequent renewal processes), but OTOH, once the TC gets
used to the fact that frequent renewals are needed, there are ways to
optimize the process (such as using the previous list of candidates as a
starting point, rather than starting from scratch each time).
Lucas
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