On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 06:58:36PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
]] Anthony Towns
Would anyone else be supportive of a proposal to set a term for tech
ctte membership?
Seconded as well.
I've a couple of contributions I wanted to make to this thread, even
though they've largely been superseded by Russ' comments :-). But
anyway:
- in this kind of reform discussions I find generally useful to
distinguish two aspects: 1) the ideal model we want to have, 2) how to
migrate from the current model to that. Entangling the two aspects
usually make the status quo win over everything else, just because
migration is hard.
For the migration in this specific case, random assigning start term
dates as suggested by Russ seems to be a brilliant idea.
- continuity is valuable in a body like the tech-ctte, where there
aren't that many decisions on a yearly basis (and hence, for instance,
it takes time to get new members up to speed). There might have been
too much continuity in the current tech-ctte membership, but that's no
reason to exaggerate in the opposite direction when introducing a
turnover process.
Based on examples I've recently witnessed in other organizations, I
agree that a good model for the tech-ctte would be the one already
mentioned by Russ (consecutive year limit + minimum suspension time),
but with less stringent durations. I believe a maximum of 5 years in a
row with a minimum 1-year suspension before being able to join again
would work well for our tech-ctte.
- more generally, I think that all Debian core teams (if not *all*
teams...) would benefit from a turnover process that requires
individual members to reaffirm, on a yearly basis, their continued
interest in keeping the role. This is to avoid that people remain on
the team simply for inertia, even though they have no more
time/interest for the corresponding tasks. It will also help
developers in periodically reassessing/retargeting their Debian
involvement, reducing the burnout risk.
This is nothing specific to the tech-ctte, but they could probably
benefit from it too.
My 2 cents,
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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