On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:08:14 +0100, Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 09:07:34PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> You see, the committee is going to define the norms. It is going to
>> lay down the acceptable cultural mores. In my experience,
>> committees never produce minimalist documents. The never know when
>> to stop. Design by committee is what gave us ADA.
> Er, do we see this pattern with the technical committee? The social
> committee would (by virtue of shared demographics) be composed of a
> similarly-minded people as the technical committee, so it stands to
> reason that they wouldn't act horribly different from one another.
I am not sure that follows. Case in point: while I think I am
a reasonably good fit for the role required for a tech ctte member
(if I were not, I would have resigned a long time ago), wil horses
would not drag me to a social committee. I don't think I fit the
demographic.
Another thing is, that we are all self selected to put
together a yet-another-son-of-multics OS -- that is a pretty narrow,
tightly couple technical field, so we are all pretty close in the
technical domain. In other dimensions, liek geography, religion,
language, cultture, politics -- we are all over the field. We've got
liberal members, conservative members, left wing, right wing --- and
given that, I don't think it is easy to come to a consensus and not
impose majority will.
>> Given that once codified, style, usability, and social polices
>> (well, almost any policy) tends to get more and more chiseled in
>> stone; creating a social policy is not in the Nay^H^Hprojects best
>> interest, perhaps.
>>
>> No, I am not sure I fully believe this, but it is a point that
>> should be considered as we dash headlong towards creating a social
>> committee and social policy to mirror the technical committee and
>> technical policy and constitutional amendments to chisel it into
>> the codex.
> Granted. Yet, I think that similar arguments must have been levelled
> in the early days against having a technical committee. Why did we
> need that, couldn't we all just get along? :)
> Self-regulation has worked for us for years, in both areas, after
> all. Maybe making changes isn't in our best interest.
> Yet, we've been pretty conservative about social matters for years
> now, i.e. we didn't tend to innovate in the community all that
> much. Having a committee for these matters won't really change any
> long-entrenched practices that people already practice, but it will
> provide a reasonable forum for discussion. (Before anyone says "but
> this is also a reasonable forum for discussion", I will just remind
> that this is a 694-member mailing list, just think about that a
> bit...)
Well, the technical committee is passive. It does not actively
make policy. And my role in the policy editing camp has been the
nay-sayer -- the default answer to a request to change policy is nay,
unless you can show reasons why the change helps debian, and is
_required_ to a certain degree.
Are we talking about the same cautious, conservative, slow to
make radical changes for the social effort? I'll be far happier, if
this is the case.
manoj
--
If the master dies and the disciple grieves, the lives of both have
been wasted.
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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