Andreas Tille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 3 Jun 2007, MJ Ray wrote: > > I feel that this would probably entrench any majority views, > > particularly with only five members. Replace with: > > > > 7. The initial Social Committee will consist of eleven Developers > > drawn by random selection from all Developers. > > Are there any statistics from which number of members on a > commitee stops working effectively? [...] > Chances are good that at least half of the members is either > not interested or MIA.
I suspect it's difficult to gather many general statistics, because the size of uselessness will vary with the personalities of the members and how likely they are to disagree. I've seen hundreds of people be an effective meeting, with dozens of them speaking in turn and AFAICT everyone who wanted to put their questions could, but that was a group with strong common aims and fairly relaxed social attitudes. The number of *active* members is what will make most difference, not just the number of members, so the size is going to be larger than one would guess. Charities are better-documented than many groups and it's easy to find info like: "The average size of boards increases with organisation size, going from under 9 in the smallest charities, up to almost 21 for the largest." Source: summary of research by Chris Cornforth at Open University Business School in 'Recent Trends in Charity Governance and Trusteeship' published May 2001 by National Council for Voluntary Organisations, ISBN 0719915910, seen at http://www.volresource.org.uk/briefing/govern.htm#picture > > 8. Should any appointed Developer be unwilling to serve, unwilling to > > serve any longer, or fail to answer three requests from the Project > > Leader within a month without warning, they will be replaced by > > another Developer drawn in the same manner. > > I wonder how long it will take to finally get a working committee > by using this procedure. Me too, but I feel it's more important to get a broad, tolerant cross-section than to make the decision-making artificially quick by limiting to five elected politicians. The project has tolerated deteriorating behaviour without effective sanctions for years, so is taking a few months to get a better social-committee a big problem? Anyway, random selection works for juries. Regards, -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]