Grant Rettke <[email protected]> writes:
> As an outside looking in only through the window of the candidates
> statements; the most interesting thing to me is their notion of what
> "steering" entails, and why.
I think the primary job of the Steering Committee is to enable the
Scheme process to make progress, as opposed to running that process
itself. (That shouldn't prevent the Steering Committee members from
changing hats once in a while, but you get the idea.)
>From my point of view, this has two aspects: A procedural aspect, and a
a personnel aspect.
I support Jonathan Rees's statement on the procedural aspects; he has
much more experience in these matters generally than I do. I have
considerable hard-won recent experience working with the Scheme
community recently, whereas Jonathan's experience is more long-term.
I'd hope that my experience running the SRFI process, chairing a Scheme
workshop, and serving on the R6RS committee could help assess and shape
the measures Jonathan has proposed.
Now, there's no question the procedural aspects of R6RS were less than
stellar. I believe we got significantly better towards the end, but not
all the damage done early in the game could be undone. My take on this
is that the primary reason the procedural aspects worked out poorly was
that the original R6RS editors were a spectactuarly mismatched set. (I
have no good excuse for this - the set pretty much self-selected.) It
contained individuals of great ability and ambition, but the combination
didn't work out at all. (The very beginning of the archives of the
editors' mailing list make that painfully obvious.)
Now, as editors, we started pretty much in a procedural vacuum, and the
"people problem", for a long time, prevented us from developing better
procedures. After that, we were making things up as we went along as
well as we could, but collectively we didn't bring a lot of experience
on procedural matters to the table. The fact that we did get better
over time, and can now review the process, and the fact that people like
Jonathan may be involved makes me (cautiously) hopeful. Even so,
getting better will take considerable effort.
I spent many, many hours contemplating what happened and what we should
have done differently: I believe measures along what Jonathan proposed
would have helped. Still, I think in the evolution of the language, it
will continue to be the case that small groups of people will need to
get together, agree amongst themelves, and hammer out documents to
present to the community, and it is crucial that these groups work
efficiently. In theater there's a saying that directing is correcting
for the mistakes you made in casting. So, to finally get back to your
original question, I think steering includes selecting the members of
such group, and helping them proceed when they run into trouble. (The
current Steering Committee did a great job of the latter, but were
constrained by not being part of the former in the beginning.)
Still, I don't know that it's possible to make everyone happy
("happiness" being an operative word in JAR's statement). Matthew
Flatt's ratification vote statement here:
http://www.r6rs.org/ratification/electorate.html#X80)
contains an excellent analysis of the problem:
> It seems to be human nature, when faced with the certainly of
> imperfection, to think that if we at least fix X and Y (for whatever X
> and Y one happens to care about), then everything will be good enough
> --- while not fixing X and Y means certain disaster. In reality, it's
> rarely so simple; consider the last few 5.9x drafts, which attempted
> to fix a few Xs and Ys, but created little perceptible change in the
> community's overall opinion of the draft.
Looking back over the statements opposing R6RS ratification, and the
discussion afterwards, it seems many people don't accept that analysis,
and think that, if only their pet gripe with R6RS were fixed, the
community would magically join in universal agreement. (If you don't
accept Matthew's analysis, please do not vote for me.) Consequently, we
need to establish procedures and staff those procedures that will help
us make progress in spite of this.
--
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla
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