I'm trying to figure out how to decide who I would nominate if nominating someone or how I would decide my vote. May I solicit some input, especially from past editors and S.C. types but, of course, also from anyone in the community here?
As a practical matter, how much time should an S.C. member be expected to put in? Is travel important? Conference calls? Should the S.C. be someone who already knows prospective and past editors and S.C. members face to face? What are the likely out-of-pocket expenses of an S.C. member? What kind of past organizing experience should an S.C. member have? Should an S.C. member be primarily a facilitator of process or should she or he come with strong opinions about the future design of Scheme? In many standards efforts (e.g., CL, Java) commercial players play a significant role and (in theory) represent the interests of many users. Scheme has a significantly smaller scale, lower-key commercial presence (it seems to me). To what extent are commercial concerns important for an R7? Scheme, compared to other languages, has an unusually high number of implementors. Scheme is unusual (unique?) among somewhat popular languages in that the default expectation is that many new implementations will be created over time (rather than everyone concentrating on just one or a very few famous implementations). Is the community expectation that the S.C. will focus attention on just a handful of "famous" implementations or that they will continue to steer the language in directions that invite many implementations? And an especially tricky one: Many of the best innovations in Scheme in recent years have come from the academic world. Most of the "luminaries" in Scheme are from the academic world. Certainly that pool of talent will be a strong force in an R7 effort. Certainly we *hope* that many future editors will come from the academic groups. Yet at the same time the Scheme Undergound also has a "popular" front of users and implementors of no particular academic standing. I don't wish to cast aspersions but perhaps I can be forgiven for observing that generally (re Scheme or otherwise) academic professionals are often seen to not be exactly comfortable with non-academics and are often seen to try to link academic credential requirements to positions of stature in formal activities -- for sometimes legitimate and sometimes not so legitimate reasons. Considering the pool of likely-suspects to be future editors, to what extent are academic credentials important in an S.C. candidate to ensure a chance of a smooth process which the academic types take seriously and work hard on? Thanks, -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
