On 08/12/2016 08:18 AM, Phil Sturgeon wrote:
Right, Lukas makes a great point.
A secretary working on a bylaw is not an issue, because it still
requires a majority vote from voting members to pass. If we're worried
about the secretaries overstepping their powers, they can't do it
unless given a bunch of +1s from the voting members, so where does
this issue stem from?
With this groups recent dedication to making a bylaw change for pretty
much anything anyone is going to do, not only will the secretaries
need to be updating bylaws, but they'll be fundamentally unable to do
anything at all without updating a bylaw first.
Updating bylaws, or creating new ones, in line with requests from a
number of voting members, then putting that to a vote sounds like
exactly their job to me, and sounds like democracy in action. Isn't
that what we want?
It was tucked at the bottom of a long email before, so I will repost
this quote from myself as it seems relevant to this thread:
-----
Note that I am making an implicit assumption here:
Most adult professionals will act like responsible adult professionals
most of the time, given a structure that encourages doing so. The
challenge is ensuring the right structure and organization in which to
do so.
If we cannot make that assumption, then FIG is totally doomed as is our
industry and we should just all go become farmers. :-)
-----
Some of these recent threads have gotten far, far too carried away with
influence peddling. The PHP community isn't *that* large. Most of us
know each other, at least a little. Many of us are friends. A few are
in, or were at one point in, romantic relationships with others. Nearly
all of us have been out drinking with someone else here. (I've had a
soda, but it's still drinking.) Many of our projects make use of other
projects here. We all have influence on each other to some degree or
another. That's because we're all (I presume) humans.
A completely prescriptive approach to behavior and membership is not
treating each other as professionals. That's a problem. We shouldn't
be trying to catch every exception. We should be trying to build a
structure that encourages professionals and then trusts them to act
professionally... and in the *unusual* case that doesn't happen, has
mechanisms to correct it then.
Not allowing someone to be involved in helping revise bylaws just
because they may be impacted by them is, well, silly. Everyone here is
impacted by the bylaws. That's kinda the point.
The impartiality of Secretaries isn't to ensure that they're "not one of
us", or fully detached from the world, or something like that. It's not
a Congress/Supreme Court type of split. It's to avoid the blatantly
obvious conflicts of interest of being both the process pedant (their
job) and the thing being processed, ie, Editor. It's also to avoid
burning out one person by giving them too many active responsibilities
(which is not the same as "influence".)
And lest someone question FIG 3 in response to that position, I'll note
that, for all its verbiage, FIG 3 is still a fairly loose process.
There's formality defined around certain checkpoints that we know are
missing currently, but for the most part still assumes most people will
act responsibly and in good faith most of the time. What a Working
Group does internally is more or less its business. How CC members talk
to each other is more or less their business. Etc.
Similarly, I'm not all that concerned about Paul "controlling" the Aura
vote as secretary, just as I wasn't concerned about Fabien "controlling"
the Silex vote or Phil "controlling" the League vote. As Phil notes,
though, the strongest proponent of that "controlling the vote" fear in
the past was... Paul Jones. If Paul still stands by that position, that
creates a dissonance. If he has revised his position and no longer
believes that to be an issue, I would welcome that change of heart.
That would have to come from him, however.
--Larry Garfield
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