On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:41:49PM -0700, Ben Rockwood wrote: > Committee's are bodies of bureaucrats that follow through on some action > because the parent body is unable or unwilling.
This seems overly harsh. Webster's says a committee is "a body of persons delegated or assigned to consider, investigate, act on, or report on some matter." There is nothing requiring a committee to be bureaucratic or nontechnical. > I have envisioned, and discussed with Stephen Hahn over a year ago, a > division between technical and non-technical community sub-groups to > which I call projects (technical) and initiatives (non-technical). What determines whether something is technical or nontechnical? More importantly, the Constitution doesn't define initiatives, only projects. We could, of course, say that initiative is just an alias for non-technical project, but I fail to see what that buys us. Group-sponsored committees sound an awful lot like your SIGs, and appear to have the same purpose. If you like the name SIG better (perhaps it conveys less bureaucracy and more action), that's fine. I don't really care what it's called; I care what it does. What it does is allow a subset of a Group with a specific *ongoing* interest to discuss and to act. Another plus? You don't need OGB approval to form one; it's part of a Group's internal governance. In fact I'm slightly disappointed this idea didn't originally come from a Group. > I would ask that the OGB consider using these terms instead. We will certainly consider all these issues at our next meeting, but in all honesty I tell you that I personally believe we've spent far too long on this already, and have in fact reached agreement twice in that time only to have late input disrupt that agreement. It's certainly important that we come up with the right structures and definitions needed for Groups to make progress, but we can't spend forever doing it. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
