===== TC RESOLUTION STARTS ===== 1. The Debian Technical Committee hereby exercises its power in 4.2(1) of the Debian Constitution to propose the following General Resolution:
----- GENERAL RESOLUTION STARTS ----- Constitutional Amendment: Permit TC to hold informal private conversations On a number of occasions recently, enquirers have emailed TC members' personal addreses to informally seek members' views. This has worked well; however it is not clear that Constitution permits it. This situation should be regularised. On occasion the TC has been asked to decide on maintainership of packages. It is very difficult to hold the necessary discussions, which inevitably involve discussion of personalities, in public. At the moment the TC is unable to take on a mediation role, since mediation necessarily involves each party to a dispute conversing privately with the mediator. The TC should be able to mediate if the TC, and parties to a dispute, wish it to do so. Actual decisionmaking must still place in public of course. Therefore, amend the Debian Constitution 6.3 as follows (wdiff -i): 3. Public [-discussion and-] decision-making. [-Discussion,-] Draft resolutions and amendments, and votes by members of the committee, are made public on the Technical Committee public discussion list. There is no separate secretary for the Committee. [+<cite>The Technical Committee should limit private discussions to situations where holding the conversation in public would be infeasible or counterproductive.</cite>+] ----- GENERAL RESOLUTION ENDS ----- 2. It is not practical for the TC to vote to accept/reject individual amendments to the GR proposal. The TC would wish to delegate its power to accept amendments, to avoid needing the collection of sponsors for uncontroversial changes. However the Secretary has advised that this is not constitutionally acceptable. Therefore, to achieve roughly the same effect, the TC makes the following promise. If any TC member gives notice that the TC accepts an amendment, then at least one of the following will happen: (a) the TC will use its own power under A.1(1) to arrange that the amendment appears on the GR ballot as an option; (b) the TC will use its power under A.1(1) to propose and its power under A.1(2) to accept the amendment, so that the amendment is incorporated in the version voted on; or (c) A member of the TC will publicly notify the amendment's proposer that the amendment will not be accepted after all. In this case TC will wait at least 7 more days before calling for a vote, to give time for the amendment's proposer to collect sponsors. ===== TC RESOLUTION ENDS ===== -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org