Hey Sam,
Sorry it took us so long to get back to you on this.
Sean and Ian already had quite some interesting discussion on this
subject. And
we also talked about this issue during our monthly meeting in June [1].
The rough consensus from our discussion is that the technical committee
can
always be consulted when policy editors don't see consensus among
developers,
but we feel it's the role of policy editors (and not the TC) to decide
on what
to do about policy, informed by what the whole project is doing.
At least this advisory role is our understanding of how the Constitution
defines the role of the TC.
Of course, there is scope for doing more in the way of constructive
consensus
building, and you've been doing some great stuff in that direction.
There
doesn't seem to be anything that makes the TC in any way uniquely
qualified for
this work (possibly the reverse), so people that are good at that should
just
get on with it regardless of whether they are TC members, DPLs, or
anyone else.
There's been a lot of unhappiness sort-of-recently regarding the role of
the
TC. In particular, the fact that raising an issue to the TC causes a lot
of
friction and people need to almost be having a flame-war before coming
to us.
So, it might make sense to actually discuss the role of the TC and how
this
situation can be improved during the TC BOF at DebConf19 next week
(Friday July
26th - 14:30 DebConf time).
[1]:
http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-ctte/2019/debian-ctte.2019-06-19-18.59.log.html
--
Regards,
Marga (with input from Phil and David)