Thanks, Tom, for your insightful questions. My comments are below. On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 1:30 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 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? > >From my perspective, being an SC member has required very little of my time: perhaps an hour a week averaged over the entire effort. Of course, the distribution is highly non-uniform: I probably spent 6-12 hours/week at various times (eg, dealing with resignations from the Editors Committee, planning for the ratification process, etc.) Most of the communication among Alan, Guy, and me has been electronic. We have had occasional conference calls and a few face-to-face meetings. I would encourage future SC members to have regular meetings of some sort. Travel has not been an issue: with Guy, Alan, and I all in the Boston area, face-to-face meetings were not constrained by travel. I travelled several times to make presentations at the Scheme Workshop. I would encourage future SC members to attend similar meetings on a regular basis. I would certainly be happy to discuss my experience on the SC with any prospective candidate, and I imagine Alan and Guy would also be willing to do so. Should the S.C. be someone who already knows prospective and past editors > and S.C. members face to face? Yes, I believe that knowledge of the community is an important attribute of an SC member. > What are the likely out-of-pocket expenses of an S.C. member? This depends on how much travel you do, and this, as indicated above, is something that the next SC will have to work out for itself. > What kind of past organizing experience should an S.C. member have? I'm not sure what you mean by organizing experience. I think good people skills are a must, since interfacing with the community is part of the SC's job. It is also important to be well-organized in general, but the SC is not a place where you have to deal with large numbers of details; that the Editors' job :) 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? These are all great questions, which each voter and each candidate should consider. It would be inappropriate for me, as a member of the SC, and therefore as an organizer of the election, to comment on these questions, but I hope that the members of the community (and the candidates, when that time comes) will express themselves on these issues. --Mitch
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